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"

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"

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"

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"

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"

125. The Books - Thought for Food (2002)

First off, let's be perfectly honest: I have no clue what in the hell the Books are trying to do here (both on this record and its equally lauded followup, The Lemon of Pink). I have no clue what's going on, I have no clue why it's supposed to be any good, I have no clue why anyone would like it, I have no clue why I should like it, etc. So what this is is basically obscure spoken-word vocal samples taken from old advertisements, instructional videos and so forth set to calming, amelodic washes of acoustic guitar, rumbly-sounding percussion and dinging noises. The whole thing is aggressively quirky and weird and nothing is really allowed to stay around long enough to make much of an impression. I don't understand why this is any good at all. Occasionally a good melody will jump out of the murk (like on "All Our Base Are Belong to Them") but that's the exception more than a rule. I suppose this kind of stuff makes the most sense as an attempt to inject some interest into "ambient music", which is laudable I guess, but this isn't the way to do it. So 1. I've never heard anything else much like this and 2. that might be a good thing.

MY RATING: 4.4

The Books - "Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again"

131. The Notwist - Neon Golden (2002)

This album is so oppressively mediocre it's difficult to say anything about it; only two tracks rise above the murk (the atmospheric title track and the somewhat pretty closer "Consequence")  and those only barely. So, what we've got here is middling electronic pop, with almost none of the magisterial command of atmosphere that the Junior Boys bring and none of the melodic sense of the Postal Service. I often hear post-rock and ambient denigrated as "background music", but this to me is far more deserving of the term: there's simply nothing going on here. It's pleasant, and there's certainly nothing incompetent about it, but that's it. The vaguely European vocals float away, the boringly arranged blips-and-bloops float away, the passable melodies float away too and leave no trace. You will not remember this album ten minutes after you hear it.

MY RATING: 4.0

The Notwist - "Pilot"

134. Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf (2002)

This record is completely unapologetic about its 70s influence--it's basically like listening to a classic rock station for an hour (and the little "radio" interludes, as irritating as they can get, only confirm this). I used to not like this one too much, thinking the production was too in-the-red and the whole thing was too singleminded to really enjoy, but time has improved it a little bit. Not a lot, but a little. First of all, there's not a lot of variety here at all--the opening track kicks your ass a little more than the rest do, and "Mosquito Song" brings in one of the Ween Brothers to vary the palette, but this is hard-drivin' 70s rock all the way, with massive, prehistoric guitar riffs and highpitched vocals and organ. Critics fell all over it because it certainly was rare to see hard rock played with such skill and as creatively as possible (note: sounding like 70s rock is not the same as ripping off 70s rock--compare these guys to Eagles of Death Metal to see the difference. These guys use their sound in an intelligent way, and take into account the fact that years have passed between the 70s and now). But the album is long, and monolithic, and there's a depressing stretch near the end of it that seems to be the exact same song over and over again for about four tracks, as well as the fact that "Song for the Dead" is just six minutes of ugly riffs. Aside from those problems, this is probably this decade's seminal "hard rock" (not metal or punk) record, so grab 'er if you like this kind of stuff. I personally think that if you can't beat Led Zeppelin, don't even try, but that's just me...

MY RATING: 6.5


Queens of the Stone Age - "God Is In the Radio"

135. Sigur Rós - ( ) (2002)

Conceptually, this is one of the strongest records on this list--it's split perfectly into two halves, the first half being a super-optimistic and joyous set of love songs and the second half a depressing series of apocalyptic dirges that bring to mind images of despair and your own eventual death. The tracks have no names (although they've been given names by fans, much in the fashion of Aphex Twin's Selected Ambient Works) and the lyrics are the exact same nonsense line repeated over and over again at different speeds and to different tunes. This album is a near-masterpiece, and the best album these guys have made; if you agree with me that the purpose of Sigur Ros is the construction of mood, the ability to paint modernistic pictures in your head, then ( ) is peerless, one of the greatest post-rock records ever made. Another point: This album is slow. The tracks are all six minutes plus (some surpassing ten) and generally do not change during their duration (aside from the apocalyptic last track, which sounds like all of hell is falling down on your head). If you can handle that, and you appreciate the skill required in constructing a world with sound (at which Sigur Ros are unmatched) than get this.

MY RATING: 9.3

Sigur Ros - "6 (Untitled)"

137. Iron & Wine - The Creek Drank The Cradle (2002)

This record's closest analogue (at least on this list) is Califone's Roots and Crowns, but I like this record a great deal less than that one. What Califone did (updating the practically-ancient folk sounds of Harry Smith's anthology) here becomes a case of straight-up nostalgia. While Califone replicated the experience of listening to such music while simultaneously contemporizing(?) it? Sam Beam seeks to replicate that music exactly.  And for a while it's impressive. "Wow!" you go. "This sounds really old!" And that's pretty much it. This is maybe less disappointing in light of Beam's later, far superior work (The Shepherd's Dog in particular is a great album) but it's still disheartening to hear such acts of musical nostalgia. It's the kind of thing that led people to buy up the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack and not go any deeper into the music it represented; it's nothing more than shallow history-aping, as though the years between 1928 and 2002 never happened. Music, I think, must take into account other music! That's how art develops. Each time I find myself liking a track on this record (and that happens a lot!) I realize I like it because it sounds like a certain type of music, not because of what it is. "Sounding like" music recorded 80 years ago does not automatically guarantee comparable artistic quality. You've got to move on. Thankfully, Beam did, and quickly enough revealed his astonishing talents as an arranger on later records, but this one is disappointing.


MY RATING: 5.3

Iron & Wine - "An Angry Blade"

138. The Libertines - Up the Bracket (2002)

I have to admit that my tolerance for snotty British punk is pretty low. I don't even like Singles Going Steady all that much, I think The Jam suck, and as I've already written on this very blog, the Arctic Monkeys are one of the worst "critically respected" rock groups to come along in years. So it's to these guys' credit that I sort of like this record; well, at least, I actively don't hate it. There are some good songs on here! "The Good Old Days" in particular has a great melody, the backing vocals during the chorus working wonders with very little. "The Boy Looked at Johnny" has a "lie-lie-lie" vocal thing that's so stupid and so British I can't help but love it, and "Time for Heroes" is a good enough single. I suspect my overall dislike for this kind of music might be a cultural thing--certainly these guys didn't exactly make it big in the States. I wonder what people in the UK think of the Hold Steady, a band so aggressively "local" they don't seem to me to be able to translate anywhere else (I grew up in the Midwest, so of course the band hits me in all the right places). Aside from the aforementioned songs, there's not much else here that's too memorable, but everything is certainly passable and frankly, the Arctic Monkeys make this band sound like the fucking Who. So if you want a watered-down Sex Pistols/Stranglers/Undertones/etc. (notice I didn't mention the Clash--those guys are in another class altogether) pick this up. For what it is (something I don't like) it's good!

MY RATING: 6.2

The Libertines - "The Boy Looked At Johnny"

141. Neko Case - Blacklisted (2002)

This album has the unfortunate luck of belonging to a genre I can't much get into--that of the countryish singer-songwriter. There are exceptions (once of which comes later in this list) but mostly I think this type of music suffers from being so strung to a particular instrumental style that there isn't much room for interest or innovation. Blues has a similar problem, but it seems to me that attempts to experiment with it have met with a lot more success than country. Basically this album just passes me by; it's fine enough while it's one but when it's over I can't remember a thing about it. Case has a great voice, but I already knew that from her work with the New Pornographers, and while the thing with them was that her voice wasn't required to carry much emotional weight aside from its tone (which in many tracks was just wordless backing) here it has to do almost all the work, and it's not up to it. I suppose it's not fair to trash a country record for not being ambitious enough, but this in addition to not being ambitious isn't even very memorable, which might be a more damaging quality. The whole thing is too shiny, too produced: what helps similar singer-songwriters like Jason Molina and Will Oldham is that their production styles are simple, while this takes too many cues from horrific "modern country". Not my kind of thing, I guess.

MY RATING: 3.9

Neko Case - "Deep Red Bells"

155. Clipse - Lord Willin' (2002)

As good as this is it still seems like a dry run for the masterful Hell Hath No Fury four years later; there's little this one does that the other one doesn't do better, and what few things this does that the other doesn't (uptempo party stuff), probably didn't need to be done at all. Generally the more uptempo the beat is, the worse Clipse do with it. They're masters of creepy, disturbing rap music, telling tales of utter amorality, and the best of this stuff follows that pattern. Still, this is vintage Neptunes, and Pusha T and Malice are so well-matched that they seem to be split from the same consciousness; their rapping is top-level the whole way through, completely unmatched in its violent realism, and it's only when the album tries to be "fun" that it fails. The Neptunes' presence is obvious right away: simple, live-sounding beats and minimal samples, and while they would become far more adventurous on the followup record, this one still has some amazing moments ("Virginia" and "Comedy Central" seem to me to be the standouts here). The famous "Grindin'" is worth the price of admission all by itself, a rap track that uses syncopated sound effects (doors slamming) as the beats, creating an astonishing atmosphere. There are no skits, and the album flows very well, but again it's one of those unlucky albums that lives in the shadow of a superior one.

MY RATING: 7.8

Clipse - "Virginia"

176. The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee (2002)

First thing: I don't like John Darnielle's voice. I never have, and I don't think I ever will. It's rare for me to be so irritated with somebody's singing voice, but every single time I listen to a Mountain Goats song I wonder how much better these songs would be with a better singer. Second thing: I don't much like the Mountain Goats. I think they appropriate the trappings of folk music without really doing them justice. These songs have no real sense of atmosphere; Darnielle's insistence on making the lyrics carry all the weight lends the whole album an accompaniment-ish quality, as though this were one of those "rock-by-mail" things that Robert Pollard sometimes does where he and a collaborator record an album by long distance. It's poetry with gentle folk backing, vaguely pleasant music (notwithstanding Darnielle's incongruous, childlike voice) that does not try one single new thing throughout its entire 40 minutes. A lot of people like this, and good on them, but I've never been one to believe that emotion and emotion alone can carry music. Just compare this to Devendra Banhart's Rejoicing in the Hands, a similar but nevertheless far superior record. Banhart's voice is far more emotionless, almost mantra-like, but the beauty of it meshes so well with the music that it constructs the emotion. This sounds pasted-together; nothing fits. This is literate and boring, like those bland, colorless books of short stories produced by the dozens.

MY RATING: 3.9

The Mountain Goats - "Oceanographer's Choice"

182. Max Tundra - Mastered By Guy at the Exchange (2002)

Now this is a weird one. This album sounds like someone gave Tundra (that can't be his real name, right?) the keys to a music store and told him to go nuts. There's dance music, pop, some chiptune stuff, acoustic tracks with pretty female vocals, all in less than 40 minutes. Impressively enough, all of this stuff somehow fits together--don't ask me how. The whole thing could fall under the banner of light and airy pop; there's nothing dark here. It's happy computer music! Particularly great are the two-minute dance/punk thing "MBgate" and the lengthy instrumental track "Cabasa".  There's even a song about French music video director Michel Gondry, titled appropriately enough "Gondry", in which Tundra pleads with the director to make a video of one of his songs. The whole thing seems to be simultaneously labored-over and tossed off, which is probably a harder thing to do than it seems. Not a track overstays its welcome, and if the album has a fault at all it's slightness--it seems to fall right on the edge of novelty music, as if the thing were in small part an excuse for Tundra to try out all these wacky things in the studio. But it's no less entertaining for all this, and definitely worth picking up (if you can find it for a reasonable price--used copies of this seem to be ridiculously expensive for some reason).

MY RATING: 7.4

Max Tundra - "Labial"

185. Scarface - The Fix (2002)

I've never been much of a fan of Scarface's rap persona; it's more of the "back in my day" kind of thing, the sort of rap that asserts that today's streets are more violent and lawless than those in the 70s or 80s or whatever, and if people could only (?) everything would be better. This kind of thinking irritates me more than anything else, and it seems especially disingenuous coming from from rappers who cultivate such violent images. Note that my problem is not the violence; it's the insistence that the violence isn't a big deal. This is why I'm a much bigger fan of hip-hop outfits like the Clipse, who make no excuses for their callowness and disregard for human life. So this thing is going to stand and fall on its beats, and thankfully enough, those are pretty good. "Safe" in particular is a great track, despite the aforementioned lyrical lameness. The two Kanye West-produced tracks right afterward are nowhere near his best work, but still better than most of the other stuff on here. Frankly, I can't tell why this album is on this list. Scarface's best stuff was in the 90s; this new work is basically a reliving of past glories. Jay-Z has been around almost as long, yet he (mostly) never devolved into hypocrisy and only-God-understands-me stupidity, like this album does in its terrible final tracks. Pretty mediocre, and not an album I'll be returning to much.

MY RATING: 5.1

Scarface - "Safe"