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"