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"

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"

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"

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"

109. Band of Horses - Everything All The Time (2006)

This is one of the out-and-out lamest albums I've ever heard. It's the 00s equivalent of something like Candlebox; everything is so incredibly generic that one is surprised to find that actual human beings created this music and not robots or an incredibly sophisticated team of marketers and trend-analyzers outfitted with the newest and best tracking devices. "The Funeral" is a power ballad, and in about ten years it's going to seem about as embarrassing as most other songs that bear that descriptor; "First Song" is lame glossy rock, "Weed Party" is lame folk-rock, "Our Swords" is lame folk-rock...it's all lame folk-rock. "The Great Salt Lake" has a neat little power chord opening but the melody is lame and Ben Bridwell's vocals, which sound like Robin Pecknold's with all the beauty and personality sucked out, ruin everything they touch. There are plenty of albums on these Pitchfork lists that aren't up to par, but this one might anger me the most--it's so aggressively boring, as if music were just something you did as a painful duty, something to be cranked out between other things. The following two Band of Horses albums, both of which are allegedly terrible, only seem to confirm what I think about this record. It's awful.

MY RATING: 1.1

Band of Horses - "The First Song"

110, The National - Boxer (2007)

The National are a band I like and respect, despite the fact that they've only released one album that I like without reservation, and this isn't it. One could almost say the idea of the National is more promising than the National themselves--dour, gloomy, moody music, written and produced with an exactness so complete that it borders on the obsessive. The most noticeable thing about these guys at first is Matt Berninger's vocals--he's a baritone, and he's got the kind of voice that seems to embody pain and suffering without being excessive about it. The problem with this album in particular is that it's too much of a slow-burner--music this emotionally fraught needs a few moments of release (like the four tracks "Secret Meeting", "Friend of Mine", "Abel" and "Mr. November" from Alligator, each of which were placed perfectly to relieve the tension). There just isn't any of that here. It's all slow and dark and ponderous. The sheer weight of the style sucks all the power out of what would otherwise be great tracks ("Slow Show" and "Apartment Story"). Only the opening track, "Fake Empire", really works--there's a lightness in the opening piano line that is missing from the rest of the album and since it's encountered first the style seems invigorating instead of depressing, as it does near the end. I don't want to impugn this album too much because the National do what they do better than anyone else and this really is a mostly gorgeous, well-written record; it's just too much of the same thing.

MY RATING: 6.9

The National - "Squalor Victoria"

124. PJ Harvey - Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000)

This is a record that by sheer melodic and songwriting skill manages to overcome the general boredom that one would expect to find in it. This is a big, glossy modern rock record with a big, glossy modern rock album cover, the kind of thing that brings to mind images of the Wallflowers and Tonic and Third Eye Blind and later-period Tori Amos and other mostly awful artists. But what saves this one is the songwriting: these songs are (mostly) so fucking good. "Big Exit" might be the best song Harvey ever wrote, a track that resembles nothing so much as Heart but a hundred times better than anything they ever did: the lyrics are fantastic and the chorus is heart-stopping. "The Whores Hustle and the Hustlers Whore" is like a glossier, more anthemic variation of a Rid of Me track, and the four tracks "One Line", "Beautiful Feeling", "Horses In My Dreams" and "We Float" approach and even eclipse Kate Bush in their gorgeous ambience. One or two tracks ("Is This Love" and "Kamikaze") are a little less inspired than the rest, but this is a fantastic record, varied and well-written and worth every bit of praise heaped upon it.

MY RATING: 9.1

PJ Harvey - "Big Exit"

144. Andrew W.K. - I Get Wet (2001)

When it comes to the phenomenon (thing?) that is Andrew W.K., there's not much room for subtle thinking. This music rejects subtlety, forcefully and almost involuntarily like a human body rejecting a donor liver. The message of "Party Hard" is to party hard. The message of "I Love NYC" is that Andrew loves NYC. The message of "She Is Beautiful" is that she is beautiful. There may have been subtlety in this music's making but there is none in the final result, and it's one of the greatest examples I've ever seen in which what must have been thousands of hours of studio time was spent slaving over something so brilliantly, gloriously stupid. What does this album sound like? It sounds like Van Halen's "Jump" if it were performed by Metallica. It sounds like a sweaty man jumping around a room. It sounds like if Queen decided, after recording News of the World, to double down on that style and never attempt anything else. You can't argue with this record. It will break into your house and party you into submission. There's a song on here called "Party Till You Puke", and that's exactly what the song is about. I can't argue with that.

MY RATING: 8.3

Andrew W.K. - "Party Hard" (what else???)

146. My Morning Jacket - Z (2005)

I feel like this record is a good deal more ambitious than it was credited for being--most gushed over it, yes, but basically on the level of it being a "great classic rock record", filled with great melodies and musicianship and nary a weak track to be found, and really neglected to mention what, to me, is this album's greatest asset--an attempt to combine 70s and 00s rock styles on an almost molecular level. Now, aping the 70s today is no new thing--there are a million bands that do it, some excellently (The Black Keys), some pretty well (The Datsuns, Black Mountain) and some fairly terribly (Wolfmother, Eagles of Death Metal). What My Morning Jacket are doing here, though, is far more interesting than anything those bands have yet tried--what's going on here is an attempt, I feel, to try and figure out the links between Neil Young and Radiohead, between Skynyrd and the Strokes, between the Rolling Stones and Beck, and slam them together so seamlessly that there's no way they can be accused of cheap nostalgia or contemporary scene-following. And (mostly) it works. When it does, it's a hell of an achievement--"Off the Record", to pick one, is something else, a track that simultaneously invokes Bob Marley, Neil Young circa Everyone Knows This Is Nowhere and Radiohead, and does so so efficiently and effectively that it sounds like entirely its own thing. When this album is on its game it's one of the greatest examples of rock music stretching across decades that I've ever seen. When it doesn't (a few tracks on the second half of the record) it just sounds like a slightly updated version of Mountain or the Allman Brothers Band--certainly not bad, but not inspired either. It's a kind of miracle, this album, and I certainly can't think of another this decade in which a band stepped so far outside its comfort level and had it work so well.

MY RATING: 8.9

My Morning Jacket - "Lay Low"

151. The Walkmen - Bows + Arrows (2004)

This one's definitely a grower. I don't even want to know about the number of people who bought this album on the strength of "The Rat", a fantastic song but not in any way indicative of this album's sound, and at that moment immediately swore off buying another Walkmen album ever again. That's too bad, because once you get around the fact that this is largely an atmospheric record, it works very well. The Walkmen are a five-piece rock band, yes, but they appear to be influenced less by other rock groups than by singer-songwriters like Tom Waits. Basically, if the spirit of Waits could be split among five guys in a band, that would be the Walkmen. This was the first time they found songs that were worthy of their intense command of dark and panicked atmosphere, and while it's not the best album they've made (that would be You & Me) it's probably the second best. The constant alternating between gauzy, feedback-laden ballads and aggressive rock tracks works well, and Hamilton Leithauser's voice (despite its obvious similarity to Bob Dylan's) is the perfect one for this band. Nobody else sounds quite like them, and I think that's a worthy enough achievement to celebrate. They evoke classic American folk music without falling into a single one of the obvious cliches practiced by pretty much every mediocre folk group--in its own way it's as brilliant a reinvention of blues and folk as that made by Led Zeppelin forty years earlier. But when it's all over it'll be the sound--not the songs--you'll be remembering.

MY RATING: 8.3

The Walkmen - "Little House of Savages"

166. Jim O'Rourke - Insignificance (2001)

One of the weirdest turnarounds this decade: avantgarde/jazz maven from NYC named Jim O'Rourke produces...a 70s classic rock record? I don't know what the hell possessed him to do this, but it was certainly a good choice, as this album shows there's still life in the old genre yet. Aside from the bizarre (and fantastic) cover art, O'Rourke is going all the way towards trying to make this feel like a forgotten 70s rock classic: it opens with a catchy guitar riff, there are only 7 songs and the whole thing's over in less than 40 minutes, it's split up fairly equally between sunshiny acoustic pop and big 70s Foghat-esque guitar riffs--often in the same song. The record's main flaw is that it isn't sequenced very well--there's a glut of slow-paced acoustic stuff near the end so the album just kind of peters out after the fantastic "Memory Lane" ends. Aside, of course, from the album's last two minutes--O'Rourke, seemingly apropos of nothing, piles on layers of static and noise that steadily increases in volume until the album just shuts off, leaving you to wonder just what in the hell that all was and affirming his identity as more of a noisemaker than a pop songwriter. Still, this is an excellent try, and certainly one of the more weird and singular records of the decade. A rare example of an artist seemingly stepping completely out of his or her comfort zone and coming up with a success (partially--the last couple of tracks really are pretty boring). Play it for your dad: just sneak it into the CD player between the local radio station playing "Slow Ride" and "Foreplay/Long Time" for the sixtieth time that day, and he'll probably like it. Just don't show him the cover.

Jim O'Rourke - "All Downhill From Here" 

MY RATING: 7.8

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"

180. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Abbatoir Blues/The Lyre of Orpheus (2004)

Oh yeah. Now this is the stuff. Nick Cave is one of the greatest songwriters of the past fifty years, one of rock's authentic geniuses, and this is probably one of the top three records he's made. And it's a double album! Over eighty minutes! And it's all great! Well, one or two tracks ("Abbatoir Blues", "Babe, You Turn Me On") are a little bit less great, but with this album, picking out the great songs is just a matter of listing everything. Cave's lyrics took a turn for the stranger here--whereas he used to let loose bloodsoaked tales of cowboys, murderers, and murderous cowboys, now he's replaced it for an almost Dylanesque series of bizarre images. And the music? Oh, it's great. More mainstream and less avantgarde than the earlier Bad Seeds stuff, sure, but who cares when the melodies and arrangements are so stunning? It's almost impossible to pick out the best stuff here, but I suppose I'll single out two tracks for special praise: "Hiding All Away" is about as apocalyptic as Cave ever gets, and "Easy Money" is so beautifully, flabbergastingly depressing you'll weep for humanity. I'm not saying any more--you get the drift. Why do you not have this? Buy this!

MY RATING: 9.8

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "Hiding All Away"