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"

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"

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"

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"

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"

121. Broadcast - Haha Sound (2003)

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

MY RATING: 4.9

Broadcast - "Man Is Not A Bird"

123. Four Tet - Rounds (2003)

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

MY RATING: 9.2

Four Tet - "Slow Jam"

157. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow (2003)

Lightning Bolt most resemble Deerhoof and Clinic in that their first album outlined a totally original style and subsequent albums did nothing to change it. Frankly, it doesn't matter what Lightning Bolt album you pick up--they're all the same thing, and all comparable in quality. What do Lightning Bolt do? Lightning Bolt, more than any other group, make a racket. Their purpose is the production of noise. Their music doesn't "rock" in the conventional sense; the guitar riffs are too fast to really hold onto and the absence of comprehensible vocals immediately renders their music useless to sing along to. But their music is loud and it is fast. It's basically the Platonic ideal of a marriage between the most extreme elements of both metal and punk--metal's volume, punk's speed. Their music is noisy, but interestingly it's not the kind of noise that makes you plug your ears in distaste, like a car alarm or something: it's noise deployed with a purpose, noise designed to pummel you into submission. There's no point here in discussing differences between tracks because there aren't any. Lightning Bolt are Lightning Bolt, and you're going to have to (sunglasses descend from sky) deal with it.

MY RATING (although ratings hardly seem to matter for a group like this): 7.9

Lightning Bolt - "On Fire"

165. Ricardo Villalobos - Alcachofa (2003)

Villalobos' 2003 record is so minimalist it seems to travel to a level beyond minimalism, where the only sounds coming off your computer are a series of repetitive bleeps and bloops that last 8+ minutes and seem to never, ever change. The first time you hear this album, you'll probably hate it. Villalobos steadfastly refuses to buff up his arrangements: listen closely to the few bloops you hear in the first minute of each track, because that's all you're going to hear, and the entire 80-minute album sounds so samey and minimal and without peak or valley that you're going to go nuts at about the hour mark. But there's a lot more going on here that only becomes apparent after several listens: the beats, though of course minimal, are weird and unsettling, especially on tracks like "Dexter", where the bizarre "thwa-CRACK" noise that comes in at about the minute mark takes the whole thing in a different direction. "Waiworinao" sounds like a bass guitar riff run through about a million effects filters and shoved out the other end flattened and distorted, and while the track itself changes little from beginning to end, the original noise is so weird and captivating that you want to listen to the thing over and over to discover that which you know isn't there. The whole record is like that. It may be long, it may be boring (there's hardly any other word for it) but it certainly isn't stupid or lazy, and Villalobos has done about as well as he can within the parameters he's created for himself. At the time, there simply was no other electronic music out there like this, and the years since have only solidified its importance. More significant then actually enjoyable, though.

MY RATING: 7.5

Ricardo Villalobos - "Dexter"

172. The Constantines - Shine a Light (2003)

Now this is just a great, old-fashioned rock album, the kind that seems to be in shorter and shorter supply these days. The obvious equation here (and the one referenced by everyone who reviewed it) is if Bruce Springsteen had Fugazi as a backing band, and while that works on some tracks ("On to You"; "Young Lions") it doesn't entirely work with the punkier stuff, which sounds more like the Wipers. The harder tracks are almost without flaw, fascinating bits of modern guitar-rock that outdo even Les Savy Fav, the most famous current practitioners of that style. Also fantastic here are the two slower tracks--"Goodbye Baby & Amen" and "Sub-Domestic" which are almost John Mellancamp-ian in their simple guitar and harmonica interplay and melodicism. The band never even came close to following this one up, and it's probably not possible to do so: the album takes a fairly limited central conceit and runs about as far as they can with it. One of the decade's great sleepers: almost nobody remembers this one anymore, and it's good to see Pitchfork recognize it.

MY RATING: 8.7

The Constantines - "Shine a Light"

188. M83 - Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts (2003)

An interesting situation: a creative, original sound, but no good songs or arrangements to go with it. M83's second album follows the shoegaze pattern of My Bloody Valentine and Ride, except with the guitars entirely replaced by electronics programmed to sound like guitars--so what we've got here is faux-guitar noise with obscure little electronic plinks and keyboard tones in the background designed to give the music space. The thing is loud, overpowering, and boring. There is no talent shown here in arrangements at all--every track follows the same formula: begin with a pretty enough keyboard melody and layer on noise until it becomes ear-shatteringly loud. And that's it. There is not a moment that deviates from this. One track of this is fine enough to listen to, but everything becomes nearly unlistenable when repeated twelve times. What might have made this work is if the tracks were longer and the progression-of-loudness more intricate (this is how most post-rock groups like Mogwai and Godspeed You Black Emperor! work) but nope, most of the songs are between three and four minutes. M83 would would produce one more bad album (Before the Dawn Heals Us) before perfecting their sound, but this album is really of no interest except to completists. Download one track; that's all you need.

MY RATING: 2.7

M83 - "Noise"

198. Boris - Akuma no Uta (2003)

While it's a common thing to call a group "Zep-influenced" or (less often) "the new Led Zep", most often this is nonsense. It's easy enough to toss together a high-pitched lead singer, heavy drums and giant guitar riffs and assume that's good enough to make you Led Zeppelin (just ask the Datsuns, Queens of the Stone Age, The Dead Weather, Them Crooked Vultures, etc...) what made Zep special wasn't any of this but something less definable--something in the way they seemed less like a band than a rampaging monster, each instrument an essential part of the creature's anatomy, Bonham's biblical drumwork serving as the pounding feet of Godzilla destroying a city about ten miles away. Now this is a roundabout way of saying that Boris' 2003 near-masterpiece Akuma no Uta is the closest thing I've heard to the spirit of Led Zeppelin than the band itself. It doesn't seem like human beings are playing these instruments; whether it's through honest skill or through clever production (I get the sense the drums on this album have been distorted to all hell) it's there, and there is stuff on this album that reaches the same level of heavy rock power of "Dazed and Confused". The gorgeous and terrifying ten-minute instrumental that opens the record is the perfect way to get into things, and then from there the intensity never lets up, aside from a short portion of "Naki Kyoku". The album is well-sequenced and short, which is a godsend in the age of 78-minute "epics", as if sheer length were the only thing that constituted one. What I'm saying is that Tool need to listen to this album and then go and sit in the corner for fifteen minutes and think about what they've done. Also: the title, translated, means "The Devil's Song." METAL.

MY RATING: 9.1

Boris - "Akuma no Uta"

199. Deerhoof - Apple O' (2003)

What are Deerhoof? Well, Deerhoof are Deerhoof. Nobody sounds like they do. If you for even a second thought that the traditional rock lineup of drums - bass - guitar - keyboards - vocals was in danger of running out of new sounds, these guys will quickly disabuse you of that notion. It's hard to describe what Deerhoof sound like; the combination of squiggly keyboard lines, "angular" (sorry) guitars, pounding drums and highpitched Shonen Knife-y vocals adds up to something totally original. I thought Pitchfork, if they were going to put a Deerhoof album on this list (and I suppose you'd have to) would pick The Runners Four; it's the longest, the most "epic" and the most indebted to traditional song structures. But I'm glad they picked this one. It's pretty much the quintessential Deerhoof record, containing both their herky-jerky avantgarde side and their poppier side (which really isn't "pop" in any traditional sense of the term: it sounds like punk music from Mars). So, is it good? Well, it's Deerhoof. And in the words of Roger Ebert (and I think he stole them from somebody else): if you like this sort of thing, this will be the sort of thing you like.

MY RATING: 7.9

Deerhoof - "Apple Bomb"