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"