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"

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"

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"

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)"

103. M.I.A. - Piracy Funds Terrorism Vol.1 (2004)

This served as little more than an introduction to M.I.A. and her music back in 2004, and today it doesn't serve much purpose now that Arular and Kala exist; all this album does is make me want to listen to an actual M.I.A. album. I did like that this mixtape looks back all the way to the early 90s when looking for stuff to sample; it's a big departure from the hundreds of rap mixtapes that never sample anything that's more than a year old. "China Girl (Diplo Mix)" starts out with a Eurythmics sample, which by itself isn't all that creative but shows M.I.A.'s awareness that she is closer to Madonna than Fela Kuti, who never once allowed the politics on his records to usurp the music, so too on this record its most powerful moments are when M.I.A. allows the political statements to come second behind the beats and samples. So this is basically a party record, to be put on when you're more focused on drinking and talking to other people than listening to music.

MY RATING: 3.8

M.I.A. - "Baile Funk One"

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"

107. Justice - † (2007)

It was inevitable that after Daft Punk would come the Daft Punk copyists--even moreso since it seems that the original duo don't seem much interested in making new music anymore. The band is still coasting off of Discovery, now nine years old, and it only makes sense that other groups would jump in to fill the super-bassy French house void Daft Punk have left behind them. So how does this fare? The entire thing is basically constructed around the gigantic single "D.A.N.C.E.", a song I've never really liked, mainly because the playground-chant chorus isn't nearly as good as the band seems to think it is and there isn't enough else interesting in the track to make up for it. The rest of the tracks somewhat resemble that single except with the catchy choruses removed, as though Justice only decided to copy the middle, slightly less good section of Discovery and forget the rest. All is not lost, though: "Newjack" and "DVNO" are both great dance tracks, the latter with its expertly sampled vocals almost worthy of the great ones themselves (it's as good as "Face to Face", anyway). But the whole thing is kind of neutered and faceless, as if sheer loudness were enough to overcome the essential emptiness at this album's center. It isn't, and it doesn't.

MY RATING: 5.9

Justice - "Let There Be Light"

111. M83 - Saturdays = Youth (2008)

It's so satisfying when a group with an interesting sound but less-than-interesting ways of implementing it gets their act together and finds the perfect style and subject matter for their music. Jose Gonzalez' idea to meld his super-emotional electronic noise washes with John Hughes movie soundtrack-esque melodies and song structures was one of the most genius conceptual moves of the entire decade; a specific time in music is evoked so perfectly that it practically induces flashbacks. And, most importantly, this music evokes the 80s without copying it: the songs might be a little retrograde, sure, derivative of stuff by Single Minds and Richard Marx and (most obviously) Peter Schilling, but M83's style itself is wholly futuristic. The album is perfectly tuned and sequenced: "Kim and Jessie" is basically opening credits music, gigantic chords and longing, longing, longing. The word "emo" gets thrown around a lot, and if you could somehow remove all its negative associations this kind of music is what would be left: huge, pastel-colored blasts of synth coupled with lyrics that make absolutely no logical sense but make perfect emotional sense--just like the music. Most of these songs build up to apocalyptic climaxes of electronic noise and Morgan Kibby's alien vocals, and it works. You get chills down your spine. The final track, being little more than 12 minutes of the exact same keyboard line over and over, is a little disappointing, but if you treat it like closing credits music (i.e. feel free to ignore it, walk out) it works. Just play "You, Appearing" again, and if the hair on your neck doesn't go up, I don't know what's wrong with you. A huge, huge, huge improvement on  this band's previous two records.

MY RATING: 9.2

M83 -  "Skin of the Night"

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"

118. The Beta Band - Hot Shots II (2001)

The Beta Band's first (non-EP) record legitimately sounded like the work of a band who didn't give a shit whether anyone liked them or not. It was as shambolic and disconnected a record as I've ever heard; the band themselves disparaged it later. All of which makes this followup even more surprising--every track follows the same underlying aesthetic, that of a simple electronic pop overlaid with harmony vocals. It's like a far more accomplished version of the Notwist's Neon Golden--while the Notwist so systematically stripped their songs of emotion that what was left over was--nothing, the Beta Band make sure that their electronics are wedded to great songs. Actually, this album is pretty much faultless--the problem is that the thing is so damn tunnel-visioned, so committed to a single sound, that it can become fatiguing to listen to. It's best appreciated in small doses, when you can listen to individual tracks and appreciate them at your leisure. One after another it all becomes numbing. It's too laid-back. Still, if you're at all interested in electronic pop music, only the Postal Service's Give Up and the Junior Boys' Last Exit managed to best this album this decade (and the Beta Band's vocals are way less annoying than the Postal Service's).

MY RATING: 8.0

The Beta Band - "Al Sharp"

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"

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"

132. Hercules and Love Affair - Hercules and Love Affair (2008)

First of all, I don't know whose idea it was to get vibrato-y torch singer Antony Hegarty to sing on a disco track, but give him lots of money right now because that idea was genius. That song, "Blind", along with the Rapture's "House of Jealous Lovers", is probably the high point of the entire 00s "dance-punk" thing, with "Blind" being closer to dance, and "Lovers" being closer to punk. So, what about the album that surrounds it? Most of it is the same sort of updated 70s disco, with an occasional nod to 90s dance ("You Belong"). In my opinion it's a little early to start canonizing this record; it seems like the setup for an even better follow-up. Too much of the second half is slow electronica stuff that does nothing original, and what it does do it does boringly. A notable exception is "Easy", which brings in Antony to sing gorgeous lyrics over a chilly, almost Knife-ish backing. It's truly one of the great underrated tracks of the decade, and it's in danger of getting lost within the album's more flashy moments. Overall it sounds like the kind of record the Rapture would have made had they not tried to out-Strokes the Strokes. There's always a danger of this kind of overly nostalgic music making you think: well, if I like this so much, why don't I just listen to the original stuff? Aside from "Blind" and "Easy", two songs that almost by themselves make this purchase-worthy, I don't know how well this record is able to answer that question.

MY RATING: 6.9


Hercules and Love Affair - "Blind"

142. Primal Scream - XTRMNTR (2000)

This is certainly the most aggressive record on this entire top 200 list--I mean, look at the titles: "Kill All Hippies". "Accelerator". "Exterminator". "Swastika Eyes". "Blood Money". "If They Move, Kill 'Em". The entire album is soaked in this violent, militaristic rage that in this age sounds even more prescient than it must have in 2000. If ever an album's sound was perfectly evoked by its album cover, it's this one--"Accelerator" is a garage rock song so loud and distorted it sounds like a jet taking off and the rest of the tracks are nothing more than celebrations of aggression and violence, and at points I was reminded of vintage Stooges, except with a more electronic flavor. This album is a near-masterpiece: every track feeds into the central theme of violence perfectly and each track does something different while never seeming extraneous--variations on a theme. It's a concept record of a sort--the opening sample is a woman saying "It's not sexual, it's just aggression," and then you've got the insane militaristic funk of "Kill All Hippies", stuff like "Insect Royalty" that sounds like a drinking song for robots, and "Blood Money", which sounds like Miles Davis being force-fed amphetamines in Hell. The second remix of "Swastika Eyes" is totally unnecessary, but everything else is so perfectly written, performed and produced that it boggles the mind. Bands should not be releasing albums this good fifteen years into their career. Play it loud and have your brains knocked out.

MY RATING: 9.4

Primal Scream - "Shoot Speed/Kill Light"

148. Erlend Øye – DJ-Kicks (2004)

This is a mix record, of which there are a few on this list, but what separates this one from the rest is that Kings of Convenience member Oye uses the format to indulge his own particulars, doing things like covering "There Is A Light That Never Goes Out" and re-recording certain songs with his own vocals. The whole thing is like a cross between Michael Mayer's Immer and a DJ Shadow record, and it works beautifully (most of the time). Oye has a great, soothing voice, perfectly suited for this kind of electronic pop, and the album works the best when it's focusing on that and not trying to make us "dance". Because, frankly, this isn't a very good dance record. The interpolation of "2D2F" is a near-disaster; while this kind of hyper-aggressive and filthy as hell dance track might have worked on 2 Many DJs' As Heard on Radio Soulwax, here it's a total mood-killer and doesn't fit with the rest of the record. The interpolation of the more "obvious" artists doesn't work too much either--Phoenix don't fit with this kind of record, as good as they are, and the Rapture's "I Need Your Love" is too straightforward a pop track to fit with the rest. Other than those caveats, this really is a well-sequenced, at some parts gorgeous pop record. Oye manages to keep the thing flowing nicely despite the frequent switches between tracks, and with his own re-recorded vocals there to tie everything together, it really feels all one thing, as opposed to just another mix record.

MY RATING: 8.4

Erlend Oye - "Sheltered Life vs. Fine Day (accapella)"

159. Girl Talk - Night Ripper (2006)

The issue here is not whether this is done well (it certainly is) but whether or not it should have been done at all. What Girl Talk does isn't new, at least in the macro view: he's a sampler, a plunderphonics guy. His music is constructed entirely from samples of other music. This isn't original: it had been going on for a good decade before this record came out. But what GT did to differentiate himself was simple: when he chose music to sample, he didn't do what most other samplers did, i.e. find obscure samples that gain interest when placed in a new context. He just took the best parts, the stuff that everyone recognizes. While this adds up to an incredibly fun album, it also produces the inevitable question: does this mean anything? does it have any lasting value? The fact is that as fun as this is, it's fun like eating at McDonalds can sometimes be fun. It isn't bad, exactly (it is, after all, scientifically designed to be good) and you know what you're getting, but nobody would mistake it for the best you could get, or in fact anything with any lasting value at all. A huge problem with this album is there is no tonal variety: on far superior sample records like Endtroducing or Since I Left You or As Heard On Radio Soulwax there is actual ebb and flow in the music, slow parts and fast parts, reflective and excitable. Here it's all coming at the same pace with no variation. Familiar rap verse over familiar rock backing--repeat. Over and over.  Basically, the interest lies in the quality of the original samples, not in what GT does with them, which is pretty much nothing. It's its own thing, but it's its own thing like a six-legged dog: there's a reason there aren't very many.

MY RATING: 4.8

Girl Talk - "Once Again"

 

161. Air France - No Way Down (2008)

Or: there was once a band that sounded like Air, and they were from France (well, actually Sweden), so they called themselves Air France. That should tell you all you need to know about the number of original ideas this album contains. What the hell is this? Why is this here? How is this different from anything? Alright: Air France's debut is a series of mid-length pastoral tracks and pretty 80s-y synths and samples of crickets and children's voices, all of it designed to support that "pastoral" atmosphere. It's not bad, exactly, but there's absolutely nothing here that hasn't been done a million times before in a more interesting fashion. Like, say, by Air! Air France is what Air would sound like if they had no taste and listened to nothing but Wyndham Hill records and believed in the healing power of natural crystals. It's insufferable. What can be said for it is that it does create a distinct atmosphere, but that atmosphere is dull and uninteresting and minus any variation--everything comes at you at the exact same "pretty", "wistful" level and never changes, like a Michael Bay movie that, through its endless assault of ACTION, paradoxically becomes boring. There are moments of beauty here, but they're so repetitive and over-the-top that they quickly become boring. It's not actively offensive in its badness like Camera Obscura, but this is pretty bad.

MY RATING: 2.3

Air France - "Collapsing At Your Doorstep"

163. DJ/rupture - Uproot (2008)

This is a mix record in the style of Michael Mayer's Immer series, except this time the focus is on dubstep and electronic reggae rather than minimalist German techno and microhouse. The album has the benefit of being better sequenced than Mayer's series; the unexpected introduction of Ekkehard Ehlers' orchestral pieces in the middle of the mix gives the album an emotional heft these kind of mix records don't usually have. The problem is how repetitive the album is, or, more accurately, to what minimal purpose such repetition is put. Repetition in dance and techno music usually works by creating an atmosphere of hypnosis where the track seems to be changing even though it isn't, where the brain kind of tricks itself into thinking that the next time the melody rolls around, things will be different. What happens here is even though the album is 23 tracks long the ones that would work in repetition are too short to have any effect, and the ones that would work in atmosphere are too short to create one. After a strong beginning the album becomes a depressing series of downtuned beats, a weaker version of the kind of stuff Tricky was doing thirteen years earlier, and that Burial had already bested in 2007 with his masterful Untrue, probably the greatest electronic record of the decade. This one had the bad luck to appear a year later, and it can't help but suffer from the comparison. At its best it is effectively atmospheric and the interpolation of "Brooklyn Anthem" adds a nice moment of aggression that works, but this thing basically needed to be twenty minutes shorter or twenty minutes longer.

MY RATING: 6.0

ConQuest - "Mirage"; Team Shadatek - "Brooklyn Anthem (Acapella)"