75. Ghostface Killah - Fishscale (2006)

Ghostface was always the most eccentric of the Wu-Tang Clan (except for ODB, of course, but he was on another plane entirely) and this is the one where he finally lets his freak flag fly--there's crime stories that get cut off halfway through, Rocky-ish fight songs, surrealistic drug narratives, Wu-Tang reunion tracks, and Ghostface getting yelled at by a four-year-old kid. This is, in my opinion, the greatest solo album that any member of the Wu-Tang ever put out, and considering the mindboggling quality of a lot of it (I mean, you've got Liquid Swords and the two Cuban Linx records there), that's no small compliment. There's twenty tracks here and it's all over in less than an hour but it still manages to feel epic, Ghostface serving as our weird and psychotic Mephistopheles as we travel through a world of drugs, "Krispy Kreme, cocaine, dead bodies", and whatever pops into his head. Ghostface doesn't focus as much on memorable individual lines as powerful, visual narratives, and a track like "Shakey Dog" is practically its own music video, as Ghostface focuses on little details like the seat being pushed too far up in the car on the way to a robbery. I don't know if you can call this a "masterpiece," exactly, because in any such undisciplined explosion of creativity there's bound to be a duffer or two, but the quality of the best work here is staggering.

MY RATING: 9.5

Ghostface Killah - "Shakey Dog"

76. Junior Boys - Last Exit (2004)

This album infects your mind. The first time I listened to it I didn't feel much one way or the other, but something about it led me to listen over and over again: I must have played it six times again that day, and since then it's become one of my favorite albums of the decade, despite the absence of any obvious "high points". It's a very even album, perfectly encapsulated by its cover: listening to it is like walking through the hallways of some pristine white spaceship. I know I harp on atmosphere on this page, and how hard it is to achieve, but this album is like a masterclass in it: every song uses much the same elements as the one before but never once do I grow bored or wish the group would expand its horizons. "In the Morning," as great a single as it is, would have been fatal here: there's nothing uptempo, it's all chill-out music, and even "Birthday" has a simple heartbeat-style beat that lulls you rather than excites you. The vocals are perfect, the production is perfect--this is one of electronic pop's most amazing constructions, and certainly the greatest example of it in the 00s.

MY RATING: 9.5

Junior Boys - "Teach Me How To Fight"

77. Missy Elliott - Miss E...So Addictive (2001)

What is it with albums where the second side is just a weaker version of the first? If this album were nothing but the first four "actual" tracks it would be one of the best of the decade: "Dog in Heat", "One Minute Man", "Lick Shots" and of course "Get Ur Freak On" are fucking awesome, a combination of monstrous funk bass and squiggly-sounding synths that sound not only completely new but out of time entirely: Timbaland's production here is fantastic. But the album's last two-thirds? Well, there's nothing much to say about it except that it fails to match what's come before and just makes you want to listen to "Dog in Heat" again. Actually, can we talk about "Get Ur Freak On"? That track is amazing. It doesn't reveal its genius the first time round: in fact it even sounds annoying, the perpetual Punjabi melody threatening to give you a headache, but a lot of great pop music has skirted just this side of irritation--remember "Sugar Sugar"? Hell, even on the opposite side, Laurie Anderson's "O Superman"? Pop music thrives on repetition (The Fall understand this) and "Get Ur Freak On" is such a bracing combination of genres that it transcends funk/R&B and becomes not even pop but some kind of all-encompassing music that represents all cultures: Eastern and Western, rich and poor. The rest? Ehh.

MY RATING: 6.3

Missy Elliott - "Get Ur Freak On"

78. No Age - Nouns (2008)

No Age's big breakout record jettisons pretty much everything that was interesting about them and puts in its place a somewhat generic, Sebadoh-ish 90s indie rock. Everything is fuzzy and tinny and loud, and while the songs are catchy enough while they're on there's nothing close to the previous record's "Every Artist Needs a Tragedy" or "Neck Escaper". "Things I Did When I Was Dead" is the one track that combines No Age's punk and ambient tendencies effectively, but the rest is just the same old catchy punk rock. The drums sound like a drum machine and the lo-fi-ness, rather than opening up any new creative avenues, just seems to hem the band in--the songwriting isn't good enough to make a virtue of the style, like Pavement's was, and the poor quality recording just sounds like an affectation and not something that really means much of anything. Pavement had the good sense to foreground the bass in their early records, which was interesting in such a lo-fi record; this is just fuzzy guitar and desultory vocals.

MY RATING: 4.8

No Age - "Teen Creeps"

79. Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006)

This was certainly the most gigantically ambitious pop record of the decade; Timberlake was trying to make his Thriller with Timbaland to Michael's Quincy Jones, and he didn't quite succeed, but what's there is choice: the first half of this record is one of the most consistent runs of pop music anyone's pulled off yet, and even the second half has some amazing weirdness ("Losing My Way"? What the hell is that?). Weirdness is the order of the day here, with "Sexy Back" almost purposely annoying with its stuttering, whiny organ and incomprehensible vocal repetition. Timberlake almost seems to be channeling Trent Reznor's more funky stuff on the title track, and the two gigantic "suites" that sit in the center of the record are so perfectly written and arranged that time seems to stop as you listen to them. There is no more debased genre than MTV-friendly pop music, and anyone who attempts to revive it with real creativity and songwriting deserves kudos. Timberlake could have just recorded twelve more versions of "Cry Me A River" and called it a day; instead he recorded one of the longest, weirdest, catchiest, most confounding pop albums ever made. The album is so surprising that the two generic ballads ("Until the End of Time" and "Another Song (All Over Again)") are twice as disappointing when they finally show up. But hey--just skip 'em.

MY RATING: 9.0

Justin Timberlake - "Love Stoned - I Think She Knows (Interlude)"

80. The Clientele - Suburban Light (2000)

Suburban Light is one of the decade's great achievements of atmosphere, and it is all the more remarkable for the fact that it never really strays from the standard pop formula; it's easy enough to construct atmospherics if you've got ten minute-long tracks and progressive song structures to play with, but it's a heck of a lot harder if you're writing pop songs and all you're using are the standard drums, bass, vocals, guitar. This album is a kind of miracle: it perfectly encapsulates the hazy, rainy feeling of its cover, and it never deviates from it for a second. The band's discipline is such that each track adds to the experience and yet there are no songs that "stand out"; everything is very even; selecting a favorite track is impossible here. "From A Window" is a little bit faster than the rest and "Reflections After Jane" was the single, but pretty much any track could have been a single--the songs are that good. What also is impressive here is that this music evokes no specific era: it's 60s pop, it's 70s pop, there's even a little bit of the Smiths in there for your 80s pop. It exists in its own world, a world that was created for this album only and was never to be returned to again.

MY RATING: 9.3

The Clientele - "We Could Walk Together"

81. Hot Chip - The Warning (2006)

Hot Chip produce an aggressively quirky (just try to think of any other word for that--admittedly hilarious--title track) brand of electronic pop that stands and falls completely on the level of melody; whereas on later records the dance aspects got more play here there's almost nothing that's really "danceable". "And I Was A Boy From School" is a straight-up pop track with a fantastic chorus, and "Look After Me" is the same way. The instrumentation is pretty wan and forgettable, and a lot of tracks feel like demo versions of later ones. "So Glad To See You" and "Tchaperian" are gone without leaving a trace of their existence, and "Arrest Yourself" is a fairly pointless attempt at a "harsher" track. The band's secret weapon is the natural contrast between their gorgeous harmony vocals and the dark and sterile electronic beats. It feels like a more honest bit of 80s revival than Cut Copy's similar stuff two years later; this has more of its own personality and interest and while parts of it are weak there are some tracks here that deserve to stand up as classics.

MY RATING: 7.7

Hot Chip - "No Fit State"

82. Beck - Sea Change (2002)

Beck is one of those unfortunate artists who have produced an impressive body of work but nevertheless have never made one truly great album; everyone seems to love Odelay the most, and it's pretty good, but the songwriting on that record isn't Beck's best and the production kind of overwhelms it. The general opinion on Sea Change has been pretty varied; at the time it was hailed as a masterpiece, a Blood on the Tracks for our time, then people started to back away from it, and now people like it again. I would say that song-by-song this is the best album Beck's ever made; I always find it impressive when somebody manages to wrangle something new out of the old Nick Drake formula, and in almost every track here there's some line or some bit of business that manages to be interesting. There are some truly excellent string arrangements here, and while "Round The Bend" is most impressive in that respect the Serge Gainsbourg tribute "Paper Tiger" is also very well arranged. The problem is that this sort of record is supposed to hit you emotionally, and this one doesn't. It's all very distant and cold to me, without one-tenth of the emotional power that a Will Oldham or a Jason Molina or a Chan Marshall or a Michael Gira would have been able to bring to the table. Beck is not exactly a relatable figure; he works better as a freaky whiteboy spaceman-type; he's closer to David Bowie than Bob Dylan in my mind. So what we've got here are some great songs that are nevertheless hamstrung by Beck's inability to make them connect. The album works best when Beck indulges his pop side: "Little One" and "Sunday Sun" are both great pop songs, and it makes me wish the whole album were more like them. But it isn't, and even though he's trying hard, he just can't make this connect with me.


MY RATING: 7.7

Beck - "End of the Day"

83. Joanna Newsom - Ys (2006)

How many points do you give for ambition? I posit that there was no more ambitious record in the 00s than Joanna Newsom's Ys, five superlong tracks of basically nothing but harp and strings, five medieval story-songs with gorgeous lyrics. And look at the names who helped out on this album: Jim O'Rourke. Steve Albini. Van Dyke Parks. So far, so good, but there's one thing that stops people from appreciating Joanna Newsom and one thing only: her voice. It's odd. She sounds like Lisa Simpson. But, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to praise it. I think her voice works perfectly with this kind of music; it's childlike, and that is essential. I feel like a more traditional voice would have killed this kind of music: the whole thing is so studiedly pretentious that it threatens to collapse in on itself any second and only Newsom's untrained voice stops it from doing so. And her voice makes these songs beautiful: somebody had to to take up the "strings in popular music" mantle after Dickon Hinchcliffe left the Tindersticks, and this album boasts the greatest string arrangements of any pop record since the Tindersticks' second album ten years previous. These songs are lengthy and complex, although not in the way you might expect: their construction and instrumentation are fairly simple (usually there's nothing more than a harp and strings) but their complexity comes through in their lyricism and subtle grading and lurching of volume: "Emily" and "Only Skin", both of which are well over ten minutes, reach gorgeous string-laden climaxes so subtly you hardly realize it until they're washing over you, and "Monkey & Bear" manages the astonishing feat of being somewhat catchy despite not having a coherent chorus or even sung vocals (most of them are spoken). What a crazy goddamned record, in short, and music is all the better for its existence.

MY RATING: 8.9

Joanna Newsom - "Monkey & Bear"

84. Super Furry Animals - Rings Around The World (2001)

Super Furry Animals are a pop consortium in the vein of the Beatles in that they'll try any musical style and use any idea (the comparison should end there, however). There's not a single thing they won't do, and on this album you've got an acoustic pop track that turns into a death metal song ("Receptacle for the Respectable") a countryish ballad that becomes an Aphex Twin-ish IDM track and several songs that sound like Broadway showstoppers ("Shoot Doris Day" and "It's Not The End of the World?"). It's impossible to describe exactly what a Super Furry Animals album sounds like because that changes track-to-track and even minute-to-minute, so all you can do is rate how well the songs work. I don't feel like this one is quite as successful as Radiator (which was their best collection of songs) or even Guerrilla (which was their best attempt at messing with genres) but it does have a better sense of sequencing: "Run, Christian Run!" has an honest-to-god epic guitar solo to close things out, and "Alternate Route to Vulcan Street" is a great, shimmery opener. The problem is that here the "wacky" effects occasionally crowd out the songs, which are weaker than those in the band's past, and too much time is wasted on inexplicable sound effects and noise that create no atmosphere and mostly serve as lip service to the band's eccentricity and to help bolster their "weird" credentials. These moments don't work, but the album mostly does and it's the rare pop record that is as ambitious in its sound as it is in its melody and songwriting.

MY RATING: 8.1

Super Furry Animals - "Receptacle for the Respectable"

85. Gas - Pop (2000)

Explaining how an ambient album works is just as hard as explaining how one doesn't work, and even harder than both of those explaining how an ambient album sort of works. This album is basically a drone record in the vein of Stars of the Lid except with a strong albeit sublimated heartbeat-ish percussion effect placed on most of the tracks. One thing that really helps this album work is listening to it on headphones: it is effectively numbing and overwhelming. The mix is packed solid, and it makes what is ostensibly an ambient record sound like a great torrent of noise. The problem with this album is that these tracks are not very atmospherically effective, which to my mind is a central tenet of ambient music: everything is too loud and forceful, too intense. Also, there are no moments of ebb and flow in the tracks, because how a track starts is exactly how it ends and exactly how it is the entire time between the two. The only track that really carves out an interesting atmosphere for itself is the final track (all tracks are untitled): it's by far the most aggressive and dramatic thing here, and at times it sounds more like M83 or Mew than a normal ambient album. The rest exists in a no-man's-land between atmosphere and noise without really committing to either: as an electronic record it isn't as human as Burial nor as terrifyingly inhuman as Autechre. Creative, and distinct, but all too middling.

MY RATING: 6.6

Gas - "Untitled #3"

86. Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit (2006)

Belle and Sebastian worked so well, in the beginning, because the studied unpretentiousness of their lyrics was matched by similar unpretentiousness in the music: the melodies and overall songwriting on If You're Feeling Sinister were brilliant, but not ostentatiously so; it was an album you had to listen to a few times to understand. I feel like Belle and Sebastian, more than any other similar group, has been destroyed by higher production values. This is a big, brassy and super-orchestrated pop record, and while the songs are mostly catchy the production makes Stuart Murdoch's pronouncements seem stupid instead of subtle and intelligent. It's a nakedly crowd-pleasing record, and that gets on my nerves. Every single song seems like it could fit with a montage in some indie movie, and while I'm certainly impressed with the band's impeccable level of musicianship and songwriting, something essential has been lost here. It used to be that Belle and Sebastian were nobody but Belle and Sebastian, but now they're like a hundred other bands. I don't want to dislike this record, because it's very likable. But I'm distrustful of albums that so obviously court mainstream acceptance and therefore jettison the band's best qualities, however competent their new direction might be. Certainly "Lazy Line Painter Jane" had orchestration too, but there the band was working with what was honestly one of the greatest melodies written by modern man, and as good as these songs can be at times (I do enjoy "The Blues Are Still Blue") there's nothing like that here.

MY RATING: 5.9

Belle and Sebastian - "Sukie in the Graveyard"

87. Kanye West - Graduation (2007)

Kanye West. Who gives a shit about Kanye West? I don't, except for his music, of course--which is certainly the only thing about him that anyone probably should give a shit about. This album came off the massive success of Late Registration, and was viewed as kind of a step down, but now I think it can be seen as a proto-My Dark Twisted Fantasy--a lot of the stuff that was fully successful there can be seen here in embryo. There's a lot of crap on here, though--"Good Life" is a generic party-rap track more suited to T.I. than Kanye, "Big Brother" is unmemorable and the collaboration with Chris Martin sucks about as much as his collaboration with the Maroon 500 guy on Late Registration ruled (a lot). But Kanye definitely tries to open things up here--there's Daft Punk samples, a Moby-ish choral backing on "Can't Tell Me Nothing" (great track) and the stunning "Drunk and Hot Girls", a song that seemingly everyone hates but me. I think it's fantastic, and the intentionally-ugly backing and West's lazy vocals perfectly convey the song's subject. The reason I'm mentioning individual songs here is that there isn't much of a coherent sound--West is just messing around, trying different things, and while it's certainly not awful it does feel rote compared to what came before and what came after.

MY RATING: 6.7

Kanye West - "Champion"

88. The Wrens - The Meadowlands (2003)

The Meadowlands is a concept album about the hell of middle age. The album opens with the lyrics "It's been so long since you heard from me / Got a wife and kid that I never see / And I'm nowhere near where I dreamed I'd be / Can't believe what life's done to me" and the album just gets more optimistic from there. The Wrens employ a super-duper emotional style, with the most searing vocals this side of Zen Arcade-era Husker Du and songs that more often than not evolve into great washes of searing noise. The band name, album title and first single "She Sends Kisses" suggest a quiet indie record, but that couldn't be further from the truth: this is aggressive rock music, "Happy" in particular--one of the great breakup songs, the lyrics barely literate screams of rage and disappointment. This is not a happy record, and it's appropriate that the album ends with a scream that sounds like it's shredding the recording equipment. The downside to this record is that it's a little too long (nearly an hour) and the stuff in the second half just doesn't reach the incredible emotional power of that in the first half--the lyrics are a little more oblique, the melodies less immediate. It says something that for the first 5 or so tracks I was convinced that this was a near-perfect album, a 9.5 or greater; but it isn't, it's mortal, and the second half drags the whole thing down significantly. But the first half is still as powerful and as violent as it ever was, and it goes a long way towards justifying that whole hated genre of "emo"--which, like it or not, this album is.

MY RATING: 8.4

The Wrens - "Happy"

89. Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary (2005)

Wolf Parade stand at the center of a dizzying number of Canadian indie rock groups such as Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, Swan Lake and the Handsome Furs and while a little more palatable, this stuff is much the same: synthy indie rock fronted by Dan Boeckner and/or Spencer Krug, both of whom sound like bleating goats and neither of whom I can distinguish from the other. This album is notably less "polished" than later albums but it's a lot less boring (their 2010 album Expo 86 is one of the most boring, pointless albums I've ever heard in my life). Listening to stuff like this only confirms my suspicion that the Talking Heads were the most important and influential rock group of the postpunk era: this stuff is basically Speaking in Tongues-era Heads with a little less synth and dance influence. The vocalists sound like nerds, the music is herky-jerky and angular and weird little synth noises poke in and out of the music occasionally--not enough to dance to but enough to make it so the band isn't just labeled a "punk" band. Do I like it? I do, sometimes--"Shine a Light" is great fist-pumping rock, "We Built Another World" has a great arrangement and is lyrically fascinating, and "I'll Believe in Anything" is a near-epochal single, the kind of thing that would have sounded perfect on a mid-90s modern rock station coming between Nirvana and Cake and and the Toadies and so forth. What it does it does very well, although it's a little retrograde--it's the same old modern rock stuff dressed up in a new outfit. But that's fine, and when there are enough great songs as there are on this album, I'm willing to forgive just about anything.

MY RATING: 7.8

Wolf Parade - "It's a Curse"

90. Jay-Z - The Black Album (2003)

Rap music's main topic is egotism: it's the nature of the beast. Ninety percent of rap lyricism is discussing why the singer is superior to everything around him, and it's the endless available variations on that theme that give the music its brilliance and vitality. But Jay-Z's The Black Album is in another class entirely. What Jay does here is kind of stand outside himself and view himself dispassionately, as an artifact, as a sensation, as a thing. It was designed as Jay-Z's final statement, a wrapping-up of everything he ever needed to say about himself, and while it didn't turn out that way (much to my chagrin: everything he's done since, with the exception of about half the tracks on American Gangster, has been pretty bad) it still works as a complete dissection of Jay-Z. What I'm trying to say here is that the lyrics are brilliant. "Moment of Clarity" gets the most attention, mostly because of Jay's straight admission that several of his albums suck and he knows it, but there's also the astonishing wordplay of "99 Problems" (how many of you figured out he was talking about a literal female dog in the phrase "I got 99 problems, but a bitch ain't one?" the first time you heard it? It must have taken me twenty listens) and the life's-story-in-a-track of "December 4th". The beats are peerless; even the often-mentioned "low point", the Neptunes' "Change Clothes", is nowhere near the worst of their work, and it's pretty damn catchy. Even the interlude has a fantastic beat! It speaks to Jay-Z's talent that something this good is only the third best album of his career, and while there's a less-than-stellar track or two ("Allure" in particular has never done much for me") it's an excellent (fake) swan song.

MY RATING: 9.1

Jay-Z - "What More Can I Say"

91. The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic (2000)

And now we see the dangers of the New Pornographers, the danger with their one-hundred-percent reliance on melody and arrangement as opposed to musicianship and atmospherics. If an NP song fails, it fails big time--while great New Pornographers is great music, bad New Pornographers is just unbearable. Tracks like "Mystery Hours", "To Wild Homes" and "Breakin' the Law" are almost worthless, their lack of a memorable melody leaving them as three-minute bits of nothing. The musicianship here is so faceless it could have been performed by robots--if there's a "sound" to this album it's big, candy-colored and irritating. Thankfully, there's some great stuff here: "Mass Romantic" has the band's first classic singalong coda, "The Fake Headlines" is another Carl Newman melody brought down from heaven, and "Letter From an Occupant" is four great songs twisted together and crammed into four minutes. Even these songs, though, hold little of interest outside of their melodies and arrangements: I find "Letter From an Occupant" near-unlistenable despite its obvious melodic brilliance. There is no sense of quietness or loudness here: everything is shoved at you at the same volume, and the entire thing just seems like the one-off it was intended to be at the time (which it wasn't, to our good fortune: the miracle record Twin Cinema was five years away). Some good songs, some bad songs, all bad presentation.

MY RATING: 6.5

The New Pornographers - "The Body Says No"

92. Björk - Vespertine (2001)

I really, really wanted to like this album. Post and Homogenic are both masterpieces, but the key to their greatness was that they combined Bjork's persona with understandable song structures and melodies. When Bjork abandons this, the results are unlistenable (Medulla). She's just not suited for experimental music--the worst of it seems like a less good Yoko Ono, terrible vocal experiments layered over uninspiring backdrops. This album isn't nearly as bad as Medulla but you can sense Bjork moving in that direction--most of the songs are "atmospheric"-ish little poetic experiments that become tiring over the album's nearly hour-long length. The only tracks that really work are the opening "Hidden World", with its hypnotizing vocal backing and lovely closing track "Unison". The rest is just frighteningly unmemorable and disappointing--what happened to the mid-album ass-kicking of "It's Oh So Quiet" and "Enjoy"? The gorgeous string arrangements on "Joga" and "Bachelorette"? There's nothing on this record that even approaches the ambition and power of what Bjork's already achieved. It's Bjork-lite.


MY RATING: 4.4

Bjork - "Pagan Poetry"

93. 2 Many DJs - As Heard on Radio Soulwax Pt.2 (2002)

The question is: what makes this album so much better than Girl Talk's far more popular entries into the world of DJ mixes and sampling? I think it's because the 2 Many DJs guys allow the samples room to breathe, allow brilliant pairings to gain in power by adding and subtracting elements, rather than just going from one bit to another over a 50-minute span. Also, everything is perfectly sequenced here; this thing's like a dance party on a disc, with hardly a dull moment and some brilliant combinations (Destiny's Child and Dolly Parton!) that, again, are allowed to develop into distinct tracks of their own. I'm sure somebody's sent you a mashup or two on Youtube or whatever; think of this album as an hour of brilliant mashups. I suppose you could denigrate this album by simply saying it's no more than a "dance record", that by focusing on the more recognizable elements of the samples the group is going for the lowest common denominator, that what other electronic artists do with sampling is far more subtle and nuanced, etc. All of which is true. But it's not fair to knock an album for not doing what it isn't even trying to do; what this album is clearly trying to do is be the most kickass sample-based album of the decade, and at that it succeeds completely.

MY RATING: 9.0

2 Many DJs - "ELP - Peter Gunn (Live); Basement Jaxx - Where's Your Head At (head-a-pella)"

94. Mclusky - Mclusky Do Dallas (2002)

I still find it hard to think of this record as anything more than an average punk record with better one-liners and song titles than most ("The World Loves Us And Is Our Bitch" is my favorite), but if you like simple punk rock, you could hardly do worse. Even though the band is British they largely avoid the "snotty British punk" thing that capsizes the Libertines and the Arctic Monkeys (and this album is certainly better than anything those two bands have released). The problem is that everything is so punishingly simple and the band doesn't have enough personality to transcend their simplicity, the way the Ramones did. Also, the Ramones were better songwriters--there are good riffs here, sure, but the only good song to be found is the near-classic "To Hell With Good Intentions," which stands astride the rest of the album like the proverbial colossus and makes you realize exactly how middling the rest of it is. There's about half the intensity and songwriting skill here than on the decade's best punk record, Jay Reatard's Blood Visions. Not bad by a long shot, but maybe it's just the dearth of great punk music in the 00s that made this album stand out, rather than any truly classic qualities.

MY RATING: 6.4

Mclusky - "Collagen Rock"

95. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House (2006)

There's hardly an album cover out there that so perfectly encapsulates the music inside: sedate, calm, tasteful. The French director Robert Bresson was fond of having his actors do dozens of takes of each scene, just to tire them out so they'd be too exhausted to "act", so he could get the performances he wanted out of them. This album has the same feeling--it sounds tired. Lead vocalist Ed Droste sounds like he's been taking gallons of Sudafed and the rest of the band plods along behind him. I suppose you could call this a "folk" record although the instrumentation is too varied for that label to stick. Yellow House sounds as though every moment has been so slaved-over, so studied, that there's absolutely no room for interest or surprise. These guys aren't here to have fun, and while I can respect that to an extent the whole thing is so labored and humorless that it's a real chore to sit through. It's an album you admire, not like. Still, they manage to get one stone-cold masterpiece out of all this--"Colorado" is almost freakishly gorgeous, one of the most stunning compositions of the decade, and the one moment where the band's insular obsessions feel earned. The rest is dense and wholly unlikable, progressive in song construction but without the emotional highs that give the best of progressive rock its power, and without the sense of intimacy that the best folk records provide. Cold and impressive and boring.

MY RATING: 5.3

Grizzly Bear - "Lullabye"

96. Spoon - Girls Can Tell (2001)

Spoon are one thing above all, and that is dependable. I suppose you could also call them minimalistic, which they certainly are for a rock band, but after five critically lauded albums, none of which really departed from their central style, dependable makes more sense. We're going to be seeing a lot of Spoon on this list (they're up there with Radiohead in the critically-respected game) but it's hard to think of things to say about them; they practice an uber-cool kind of rock music that apes the atmosphere of jazz if none of its content. Everything is simple, instrumentally minimal, and catchy. The problem with Girls Can Tell is that the style works more as a straitjacket than anything else; I can hardly tell any difference between the first five tracks on this album at all, and after the nifty little organ-led ballad "Anything You Want" there's another six or so songs that hew so closely to the same sound that you can't tell them apart. Now, sometimes, that's okay. Clientele's Suburban Light certainly is just as, if not more, monochromatic in style than this one is and that one comes out a near-masterpiece. But that one has atmosphere and this one doesn't. It's just a series of slightly jazzy rock songs; there's little of the synth that the band would add to their repertoire on Kill the Moonlight and none of the horn overdubs they threw in on Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. It kind of sounds like a slightly more upbeat National at times, and that's hardly something anyone needs.

MY RATING: 6.1

Spoon - "Lines in the Suit"

97. The Dismemberment Plan - Change (2001)

I'm a little dubious of the concept of "maturity" in making music. Usually it's nothing more than an admission that the album in question is less creative, less risky than those that have come before. R.E.M.'s Automatic for the People is undoubtedly more "mature" than Lifes Rich Pageant, but is it better? Is Nine Inch Nails' Year Zero a better album than The Downward Spiral just because its subject matter is more concerned with "important" subjects? Is Nick Cave's lugubrious The Boatman's Call better than the gloriously ridiculous Your Funeral...My Trial? I doubt it. This is all to say that it's almost a miracle when a more "mature" album manages to outdo its predecessors, and the Dismemberment Plan's Change is one of those miracles. In his prime, Travis Morrison was one of the greatest lyricists on the planet Earth, and Change is loaded with examples of his skill: "There will be times when you will not like the sound of my voice"; "I've watched the rich risk it all for 15 minutes in a Heathrow bathroom". It's not as universally-loved a record as Emergency & I but it's a better one: while that album had a few too many filler-y punk rock tracks (because no matter how much I might love them, the Dismemberment Plan's primary skill is not "rocking") this one is just one brilliantly written and composed rock track after another. "Superpowers" is the most anthemic song they ever wrote, "Time Bomb" should have been a massive hit, and "The Other Side" is one of the best love songs written by anybody this decade. "Come Home" and "Following Through" are admittedly a little weak compared to the rest of the album, but overall this is this band's strongest statement.

MY RATING: 8.9

The Dismemberment Plan - "Superpowers"

98. Cat Power - You Are Free (2003)

Cat Power's You Are Free is one of the great emotional experiences of the decade. Songs like "I Don't Blame You" and "Names" are textbook examples of the power of sheer performance to overcome substandard melody; both of these songs are basically simplistic piano vamps but Chan Marshall turns them into songs so emotionally punishing that I, personally, find this album hard to listen to. "Good Woman" in particular is a masterpiece, one of the greatest examples of "alt-country" I can think of and a piece of music that would move just about anybody to tears. Actually, every single track on this album has that power to an extent--Marshall's voice is so gorgeous and evocative that she fixes everything she touches. And this album might need a little fixing: a few of the songs have little going for them outside of Marshall's charisma, and if you pressed me I'd say the whole thing was probably about ten minutes too long. But that hardly seems to matter when you're listening to something as powerful as "Shaking Paper," a song that I'll be damned if I can understand but nevertheless is about as astonishing a construction from simple elements that I've ever heard. So: pick it up, and have a good cry.

MY RATING: 9.2

Cat Power - "Names"

99. Lil Wayne - Da Drought 3 (2007)

First off: Lil Wayne is some kind of a genius. There is nobody else in hip-hop with his ability to conjure up bizarre images from nothing--his skill in wordplay is unmatched. The problem, like with many geniuses, is he seemingly has no ability to distinguish between quality and subpar work: he just lets it all flow out of him as it comes and the rest of us have to try to pick out the good stuff from the bad. This mixtape is a nearly two hour-long tribute to Weezy's genius and madness, and you're just as likely to be amazed as you are to be bored. There are tracks so tight they could have fit on a regular album ("Walk It Out") and Wayne ranting for ten minutes over a minimalistic beat ("Outro"). If you're the type who likes his albums to be immaculate objects without flaw, then stay far away, but if you don't mind sitting through some boredom, then this won't seem too bad. Me I'm not really the type to sit through stuff like Self-Portrait and Sandanista! even though I'm a big fan of both Bob Dylan and the Clash, so this album's appeal is fairly limited for me. But if you like Wayne, this is nothing less than his brain torn out and spread out over two hours of music. Beware.

MY RATING: 5.6

Lil Wayne - "Swizzy (Remix)"

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"

101. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand (2004)

Franz Ferdinand's first album is one of the finest examples of a type of music that in the future is going to signify the 00s just as disco signified the late 70s and British Invasion signified the mid-60s: angular, Gang of Four-esque rock. What FF did to vary the formula was add a gigantic, ass-shaking low end (so heavy that in fact none other than Kanye West once called the band "white crunk") and catchier, Hollies-esque melodies. It's amazing how well-formed this is, and it's only a debut; only Bloc Party's first album beats it, I think, and only the Strokes come close. Everyone's heard "Take Me Out", but "Cheating on You" beats both the Vines and the Hives at their own game and the lyrics to "Michael" must have pissed off more than one idiotic jock-type who bought this record because of "Take Me Out". Granted, everything's not perfect: I've always thought the other gigantic single "This Fire" was too simplistic for its own good and "Come On Home" is pure filler. Also, the album's production is weak: playing this record back-to-back with the later FF albums just shows how much better their later ones sound (even though they never reached this level of songwriting again). A near-great album, even if it's one that people like to pile on for being "shallow"--but how "deep", exactly, are those early Beatles records, I ask you?

MY RATING: 8.8

Franz Ferdinand - "Jacqueline"

102. The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree (2005)

I don't think I'll ever be able to appreciate John Darnielle's music; his voice is so annoying and unlikable (for me) that everything he sings, no matter how gorgeous or well-written, is utterly mangled. This album is about his relationship with his abusive stepfather, and while that's an interesting subject to approach through music the lyrics have a tinge of safeness to them, of overly-studied "tossed-off"-ness. Maybe it's just Darnielle's voice that's throwing me off, but everything here is just so composed that it's bloodless. Listen to Will Oldham's music for comparison--even on a (relatively) weak recording like The Letting Go he blends in perfectly with the music, and songs like "The Seedling" and "Strange Form of Life" have real emotional power. Also someone like Jason Molina--his music and subject matter is similar to Darnielle's but there's a power in his lyrics and arrangements that Darnielle almost completely lacks. It sounds like a self-help record, an album that would have a hotline listed in the liner notes for someone to call if they also have an abusive family member. Again, it's not the subject matter that sinks this record; it's that the subject matter is not interpreted in an interesting way. Darnielle needs to give his stuff to other musicians, maybe; his voice sinks everything he does. He sounds kind of like Thomas Dolby; just imagine the guy who sang "She Blinded Me With Science" trying to sing super-emotional folk songs and you'll understand my ambivalence toward this record and everything else the Mountain Goats do. The arrangements are boring; the vocals weak. Just another folk record.

MY RATING: 3.7

The Mountain Goats - "Broom People"

103. M.I.A. - Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol.1 (2004)

This served as little more than an introduction to M.I.A. and her music back in 2004, and today it doesn't serve much purpose now that Arular and Kala exist; all this album does is make me want to listen to an actual M.I.A. album. I did like that this mixtape looks back all the way to the early 90s when looking for stuff to sample; it's a big departure from the hundreds of rap mixtapes that never sample anything that's more than a year old. "China Girl (Diplo Mix)" starts out with a Eurythmics sample, which by itself isn't all that creative but shows M.I.A.'s awareness that she is closer to Madonna than Fela Kuti, who never once allowed the politics on his records to usurp the music, so too on this record its most powerful moments are when M.I.A. allows the political statements to come second behind the beats and samples. So this is basically a party record, to be put on when you're more focused on drinking and talking to other people than listening to music.

MY RATING: 3.8

M.I.A. - "Baile Funk One"

104. The Postal Service - Give Up (2003)

I really wanted to dislike this record--at first listen it's the worst kind of adult-contemporary pabulum, pleasant electronic pop with wistfully pretty and studiedly "clever" lyrics about love and all that. But I can't hate it. The melodies are too well-written and the instrumentation gels so well with the vocals that I can't discount it. The melody of "Such Great Heights" is cloying and annoying, yes, but once you get beyond that you can start to appreciate the finer points of this record--the way "We Will Become Silhouettes" seems to eschew a chorus melody until the last possible second, the heavily processed horn samples of "Clark Gable", the pounding noise of the first few minutes of "Natural Anthem". It's like a much-improved version of the Notwist's Neon Golden, except where that record was content to float in a puddle of its own mediocrity this one tries to be catchy--even anthemic--something that at first might seem at odds with the practiced simplicity of the electronic instrumentation, but works incredibly well most of the time. Ben Gibbard's vocals are an acquired taste, yes, but I can't think of any other sort of singing that would sort this kind of music so well. A real surprise. As this type of electronic pop goes it doesn't quite reach the mastery of the Junior Boys (who are this genre's masters) but it's a clear improvement on the Notwist.

MY RATING: 8.5

The Postal Service - "Clark Gable"

105. Battles - Mirrored (2007)

I've yet to wander much into the somewhat frightening (and terribly-named) world that is "math-rock"; it seems to be more about technical prowess than emotion and I don't like that kind of stuff. Battles vary the palette with adding weird, processed vocals and when it's all put together this stuff sounds like battle (aha!) music for some kind of possessed chipmunk army. One thing to be said: the musicianship on this record is almost wholly perfect and the production is fantastic. "Race:In" performs the neat trick of making it sound like the performers are going at it right in your own room, and "Bad Trails" is repetitive but produces a frightening little atmosphere (and was memorably used in the underrated film Big Fan). The problem with albums that carve out a distinct sonic atmosphere for themselves (and this one certainly does) is that if the resulting album is not sufficiently emotionally convincing it can sound like novelty music, a one-off. Two other famous "singular-sounding" albums--My Bloody Valentine's Loveless and Slint's Spiderland--moved beyond their oddness through transcendence in the first case and power and terror in the second, and this album really has neither of those. It's a nifty little curio, and since this band seems to be all but broken up right now, never to release a followup, that's probably what it will remain.

MY RATING: 7.4

Battles - "Atlas"

106. Manitoba - Up in Flames (2003)

In electronic, sample-based music it's usually electronic elements that are sampled and placed in new contexts; what this album tried to do was take acoustic music and mess with it electronically so that the two types of music (electronic and acoustic) would be bonded on a molecular level. This sounds like psychedelia more often than not, and a lot of this sounds like a more lush but less melodic version of Love's Forever Changes. Vocals are chopped up and abused in the same fashion, but the effect is pleasantly relaxing (this is not intense music). The whole album is basically just a huge, candy-colored collection of psychedelia; there's not much to say about it as it changes little throughout its duration (honestly the whole album sounds like individual parts of a single longish track) but on the whole this stuff feels a lot more honest and creative to me than repetitive "psychedelic nostalgia" bands like the Brian Jonestown Massacre and the Dandy Warhols. Just let it relax and carry you away, etc...

MY RATING: 8.3

Manitoba - "Kid You'll Move Mountains"

107. Justice - † (2007)

It was inevitable that after Daft Punk would come the Daft Punk copyists--even moreso since it seems that the original duo don't seem much interested in making new music anymore. The band is still coasting off of Discovery, now nine years old, and it only makes sense that other groups would jump in to fill the super-bassy French house void Daft Punk have left behind them. So how does this fare? The entire thing is basically constructed around the gigantic single "D.A.N.C.E.", a song I've never really liked, mainly because the playground-chant chorus isn't nearly as good as the band seems to think it is and there isn't enough else interesting in the track to make up for it. The rest of the tracks somewhat resemble that single except with the catchy choruses removed, as though Justice only decided to copy the middle, slightly less good section of Discovery and forget the rest. All is not lost, though: "Newjack" and "DVNO" are both great dance tracks, the latter with its expertly sampled vocals almost worthy of the great ones themselves (it's as good as "Face to Face", anyway). But the whole thing is kind of neutered and faceless, as if sheer loudness were enough to overcome the essential emptiness at this album's center. It isn't, and it doesn't.

MY RATING: 5.9

Justice - "Let There Be Light"

108. Sonic Youth - Murray Street (2002)

Sonic Youth worked hard to carve out a totally original sound for themselves in the 80s, of which Daydream Nation was the apotheosis, but, that apex reached, it seems like now a Sonic Youth record is more successful based on how much it deviates from the SY formula (the great pop record Rather Ripped) rather than how much it adheres to it (the boring Sonic Nurse and The Eternal). Thankfully Murray Street follows the former more than the latter path and uses the Sonic Youth sound not for avantgarde noisemaking but for sheer atmospheric beauty. This is certainly the most gorgeous album Sonic Youth have ever made--certainly it isn't the strongest in songwriting or sheer power, but that isn't its focus: its focus is to be pretty, and it does that wonderfully. Also, SY's infamous noise breaks in the middle of each track are used this time in the service of emotional power rather than wacky guitar experimentation. Even the lengthy feedback part that covers about seven minutes in "Karen Revisited" has a clear emotional trajectory from beginning to end--something new for this band. These are not conventional songs in any sense of the word--they meander and move through various instrumental passages, but the passages are very pretty, and this is a great record to fall asleep to. Who would have thought that in the days of "Death Valley 69"?

MY RATING: 8.1

Sonic Youth - "Rain On Tin"