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"

86. Belle and Sebastian - The Life Pursuit (2006)

Belle and Sebastian worked so well, in the beginning, because the studied unpretentiousness of their lyrics was matched by similar unpretentiousness in the music: the melodies and overall songwriting on If You're Feeling Sinister were brilliant, but not ostentatiously so; it was an album you had to listen to a few times to understand. I feel like Belle and Sebastian, more than any other similar group, has been destroyed by higher production values. This is a big, brassy and super-orchestrated pop record, and while the songs are mostly catchy the production makes Stuart Murdoch's pronouncements seem stupid instead of subtle and intelligent. It's a nakedly crowd-pleasing record, and that gets on my nerves. Every single song seems like it could fit with a montage in some indie movie, and while I'm certainly impressed with the band's impeccable level of musicianship and songwriting, something essential has been lost here. It used to be that Belle and Sebastian were nobody but Belle and Sebastian, but now they're like a hundred other bands. I don't want to dislike this record, because it's very likable. But I'm distrustful of albums that so obviously court mainstream acceptance and therefore jettison the band's best qualities, however competent their new direction might be. Certainly "Lazy Line Painter Jane" had orchestration too, but there the band was working with what was honestly one of the greatest melodies written by modern man, and as good as these songs can be at times (I do enjoy "The Blues Are Still Blue") there's nothing like that here.

MY RATING: 5.9

Belle and Sebastian - "Sukie in the Graveyard"

95. Grizzly Bear - Yellow House (2006)

There's hardly an album cover out there that so perfectly encapsulates the music inside: sedate, calm, tasteful. The French director Robert Bresson was fond of having his actors do dozens of takes of each scene, just to tire them out so they'd be too exhausted to "act", so he could get the performances he wanted out of them. This album has the same feeling--it sounds tired. Lead vocalist Ed Droste sounds like he's been taking gallons of Sudafed and the rest of the band plods along behind him. I suppose you could call this a "folk" record although the instrumentation is too varied for that label to stick. Yellow House sounds as though every moment has been so slaved-over, so studied, that there's absolutely no room for interest or surprise. These guys aren't here to have fun, and while I can respect that to an extent the whole thing is so labored and humorless that it's a real chore to sit through. It's an album you admire, not like. Still, they manage to get one stone-cold masterpiece out of all this--"Colorado" is almost freakishly gorgeous, one of the most stunning compositions of the decade, and the one moment where the band's insular obsessions feel earned. The rest is dense and wholly unlikable, progressive in song construction but without the emotional highs that give the best of progressive rock its power, and without the sense of intimacy that the best folk records provide. Cold and impressive and boring.

MY RATING: 5.3

Grizzly Bear - "Lullabye"

102. The Mountain Goats - The Sunset Tree (2005)

I don't think I'll ever be able to appreciate John Darnielle's music; his voice is so annoying and unlikable (for me) that everything he sings, no matter how gorgeous or well-written, is utterly mangled. This album is about his relationship with his abusive stepfather, and while that's an interesting subject to approach through music the lyrics have a tinge of safeness to them, of overly-studied "tossed-off"-ness. Maybe it's just Darnielle's voice that's throwing me off, but everything here is just so composed that it's bloodless. Listen to Will Oldham's music for comparison--even on a (relatively) weak recording like The Letting Go he blends in perfectly with the music, and songs like "The Seedling" and "Strange Form of Life" have real emotional power. Also someone like Jason Molina--his music and subject matter is similar to Darnielle's but there's a power in his lyrics and arrangements that Darnielle almost completely lacks. It sounds like a self-help record, an album that would have a hotline listed in the liner notes for someone to call if they also have an abusive family member. Again, it's not the subject matter that sinks this record; it's that the subject matter is not interpreted in an interesting way. Darnielle needs to give his stuff to other musicians, maybe; his voice sinks everything he does. He sounds kind of like Thomas Dolby; just imagine the guy who sang "She Blinded Me With Science" trying to sing super-emotional folk songs and you'll understand my ambivalence toward this record and everything else the Mountain Goats do. The arrangements are boring; the vocals weak. Just another folk record.

MY RATING: 3.7

The Mountain Goats - "Broom People"

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"

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"

117. Low - Things We Lost in the Fire (2001)

What is your tolerance for depression in music? What is your tolerance for moroseness? It better be high, because this record, as beautiful as it is, might well drive you to suicide if you listen to it in the wrong frame of mind. It's not happy music. The first lyric is "When they found your body / Giant X's on your eyes" and it only gets more despairing from there. Low's music is like a black-and-white line drawing: everything is leached out of it until all that's left is a skeleton, the aching slowness of their melodies repeating and repeating. The two vocalists sing as though they thought there was nothing left to live for. I find this album to be one of the decade's most emotionally punishing--you either have to give yourself up to it or ignore it entirely. Not a single song deviates from the general atmosphere of glacial depression except for "Dinosaur Act", and that one's just a little bit louder than the rest--and just as depressing. I can't love this album--I don't think anyone really could--but it is what it is: a celebration of the futility of love and laments for the dead.

MY RATING: 8.8

Low - "Closer"

122. Ryan Adams - Heartbreaker (2000)

There can hardly be a more disappointing career in the decade than that of Ryan Adams, a country singer who started out by recording one of the best debut albums in the history of the genre and followed it up with album after album of second-rate, whatever-pops-into-his-head stuff. That shouldn't take away from the greatness of this one, though; what's best about this is how well Adams is able to get away with reconciling the two sides of the "country outlaw" character: the wild outlaw and the sensitive outlaw. There are far more ballads on this album than uptempo numbers, certainly, but those that are here are so powerful they come close to redeeming the entire genre. "To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High)" is certainly one of the greatest country stompers ever written or performed by anyone, a monstrous explosion of excitement that seems connected by lightning directly to the greatest folk performers of the 20s and 30s--Uncle Dave Macon, Dock Boggs. The ballads are no less good--the only one of them that approaches generic is "Oh My Sweet Carolina", and Adams saves it with his stunning arrangement and vocal performance. The songwriting is impeccable, the lyrics fantastic, the highlights so many it's easier to list the songs that aren't than those that are--this is a classic. I fully believe that.

MY RATING: 9.5

Ryan Adams - "Bartering Lines"

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"

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"

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"

143. The Decemberists - Picaresque (2005)

The Decemberists have their own sound and their own purpose, and you either have to give yourself over to it and accept it, or reject them entirely. Their sound is a super-bookish collection of overwritten songs about pirates, star-crossed lovers, sailors, spies and so forth, the lyrics loaded with three-dollar words (just look at the opening track: "palanquin", "largesse", "infanta", "folderol", "chaparral", "phalanx", "rhapsodical"). The singer, Colin Meloy, sounds just like Al Stewart (I also look exactly like him--Meloy, not Stewart--in case you wanted to get a picture of your humble webmaster), so if that's your thing...I actually enjoy a great deal of this, and its preciousness really doesn't get on my nerves too much simply because the lyrics are (mostly) well-written in spite of their studied archness and the melodies are (mostly) excellent and the songs are well-performed. What separates this group from every other roaming pack of drama and English majors is that they have a real talent at constructing a world for each song they write: the instruments and arrangements are perfectly chosen for each topic. They are masters of atmosphere. Actually, the followup record The Crane Wife seems, to me, to be easily this group's masterpiece, and I'm not sure why this one was chosen to represent the group on this list. This album, for example, contains the infamous "The Mariner's Revenge Song", a minimalistic story-song that might work well in concert but recorded is a near-disaster, where it seems little more than an interminable nine minute long novelty track. "On The Bus Mall" has wonderful, evocative lyrics but the melody is too undistinguished to support its six minutes, and I don't know what the hell the band is trying to do in "The Bagman's Gambit". Overall this is good, but I'd only recommend it if you've already picked up The Crane Wife and want to hear more.

MY RATING: 7.3

The Decemberists - "We Both Go Down Together"

168. Califone - Roots & Crowns (2006)

Califone's Roots & Crowns is like a tribute to the kind of music found on Harry Smith's Anthology of American Folk Music: wild hoedowns and slower, banjo-picking tracks. True enough, there's more than enough of this kind of music out there, but what separates this from the rest of the pack is an uncanny ability to recreate the unknowable creepiness of listening to a recording that's 80+ years old. Everything on this album is soaked in a kind of fuzzy hiss, and the vocals are distant and emotionless: the effect is unsettling, like a Jandek album but with better melodies. There are no hamfisted attempts at "emotion" here: everything is dropped to the side for the sake of a somewhat forbidding atmosphere that's uncommon in folk records, which are usually designed to be as "warm" and "inviting" as possible. There's nothing "warm" or "inviting" about this record. It's creepy and weird, with song titles like "The Eye You Lost in the Crusades" and "3-Legged Animals", little snatches of radio static seeping in and out of the songs, weird and possibly electronic percussion effects. The album is like a direct channel to the unpalatable, odd, and strange folk music made all those years ago: the real stuff. There is no ego on this album at all: everything is bent upon constructing that atmosphere. A real achievement.

MY RATING: 8.6


Califone - "The Eye You Lost in the Crusades"
 

170. Bright Eyes - Fevers and Mirrors (2000)

I have every reason to hate this album, but I don't, not really. Conor Oberst has sort of become the poster boy for emo whininess, but honestly I don't see much of that in his first record. His voice is pretty fantastic: he sounds less like a whiny emo kid than some mentally disturbed Die Hard villain telling John McClane through a cell phone that he mustn't do whatever he's doing or his daughter will die. The vocals on the first track in particular are masterful, so well-recorded that you can practically hear Oberst's spit hit the microphone. The lyrics aren't too special but what matters here is that Oberst is able to sell it. Also, the infamous "An Attempt to Tip the Scales" is hilarious. Why do people hate this? Why is it okay for rap albums to have dozens of (often unfunny) skits when this one hilarious skit on a folk album gets repeatedly slammed? It's not a real interview! It's scripted! Oberst is poking fun at himself! Anyway, the problem with this album? It contains not one single memorable melody. Not one. The songs are basically repetitive dirges, some of which are rhythmically interesting, but not melodically. Now melodies aren't exactly Priority #1 in folk music, most of them being stolen anyway, but their total absence here becomes a little tiresome on an album that lasts nearly an hour. Oberst tries to cover up the songs' melodic and structural primitiveness with his psychotic vocals, but interest in that fades pretty quick. So: not as bad as you might expect. And it's a hell of a lot better than the goddamned Mountain Goats.

MY RATING: 6.5

Bright Eyes - "Sunrise, Sunset"

174. Okkervil River - Black Sheep Boy (2005)

Okkervil River's breakout record is so good that it probably renders the rest of their output irrelevant; The Stage Names was alright, but why listen to it when you've got this? This is one of the best fusions of folk and rock music I've heard this decade, and it's all the more powerful for the fact that it sneaks up on you slowly. The melodies are subtle and sophisticated, and the lyrics are peerless. There's a line between self-pity that is affecting and self-pity that is annoying, and this album straddles it like a master. "A Stone" is probably the single most impressive unrequited-love song written by anybody this decade--the lyrics are based upon a medieval conceit, yes, but the fantastical imagery gives the song power and does not trivialize it. If this thing had a fault it's that it's a bit samey and there are probably one or two too many slow folky pieces for my taste (the album could stand to be about ten minutes shorter) but overall this is an excellently written, produced and performed piece of work. The combination of folk and throat-shredding vocals shouldn't work, but it does. All the more disappointing that afterward, frontman Will Sheff seemed perfectly content to crank out folk-pop in the mold of Andrew Bird and the Decemberists rather than pursue the dark, violent and disturbing vision that led to this record. "So Come Back, I Am Waiting" in particular is heartrending, an eight-minute dirge built around somewhat horrifying lyrics of the utmost self-debasement. This kind of why-doesn't-she-love-me stuff is a minefield, and I am in awe of how Sheff manages to avoid every cliche of the genre. A major album.

MY RATING: 9.0

Okkervil River - "So Come Back, I Am Waiting"

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"

179. Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country (2006)

This is one of the most pointless albums I've ever heard in my life. There is nothing going on here aside from cheap nostalgia. It's getting that anytime I hear the words "lush" and "60s" and "pop" in one sentence together in an album description, I start to get scared. This music is meaningless. The melodies are weak--I can't recall how a single song goes on here, even after listening to the thing about five or six times--and the arrangements are boring, great washes of ugly organ thrown over the track, done so incompetently it's as though the musicians are merely aware that 60s pop contained organ and have no knowledge how or why. It's like a weaker version of late-period Belle and Sebastian, which was already weak enough to begin with. Why does stuff like this exist, and why is it so loved? Are people unaware that it's all already been done? Plus, it's twee. This is so twee. It's tweer than a Scottish kid in a kilt playing with a bunny rabbit. It's tweer than a twelve-year old boy and a twelve year-old girl both placing their palms on a pane of glass, the snow falling on the forlorn boy outdoors. It's so insufferably cute and it makes me want to stomp on a squirrel or douse wedding guests in black paint or something. Jesus, I can't wait for this stuff to fall out of style.

MY RATING: 1.4

Camera Obscura - "Come Back Margaret"

181. Andrew Bird - Andrew Bird & the Mysterious Production of Eggs (2005)

Another album of inoffensive folk-pop, except this time there's some Beatlesy instrumentation to convince people that it's something more than an album of inoffensive folk-pop. Now here's the thing about this kind of music: I can't stand all that much of it. I love folk music, but the best of it, especially recently (I'm thinking about stuff like Songs: Ohia's Didn't It Rain and Iron & Wine's The Shepherd's Dog here) always contain some kind of darkness in the lyrics or interest in the arrangements that just isn't present here.  The whole thing is just so calculated. It's the kind of stuff designed to make well-off white folks hold their chins between thumb and forefinger and pontificate on how well-produced and pretty it is while they wander around in an art gallery and look at old photos of Andy Warhol altered in clever ways. It certainly is pretty, and almost every track has some sort of nifty production trick to keep you listening. But I play this whole thing and I despair a little bit. It's like a critic-bait movie made for the express purpose of addressing Big Themes and winning Oscars. Sure, the technicals are impeccable and there's no specific thing you can point at and say "That's bad," but it's just lacking heart. It's so goddamned well-behaved and humorless (or if it does have humor, it handles it, in the immortal words of Achewood, with a lab coat and tweezers). Like a lot of this Pitchfork-approved stuff, it makes me want to go and throw on a Meatmen or Frogs record.

MY RATING: 4.3

Andrew Bird - "Skin Is, My"

190. Elliott Smith - Figure 8 (2000)

The placement of this album on this list is as good an illustration as any of the shortcomings of the "auteur theory". Basically, if Elliott Smith weren't Elliott Smith, this album would be nowhere near a top 200 of the decade. It brings nothing new to the table, and in fact shows Smith regressing toward the almost atonal stuff he did at the beginning of his career. See, the thing about Smith was that he was basically an indie Paul McCartney in disguise--his stuff is at its strongest when it's at its biggest. The best tracks on Either/Or are the most produced, and it was on XO that he finally realized his true strengths and slathered everything in pianos, strings and harpsichords. This album, however, is a kind of half-assed combination of his simpler and his more complex work, with weaker melodies than either. "Junk Bond Trader" has a nice classic-rock feel, and "Everything Means Nothing To Me" makes a real emotional connection, but the rest of this is largely absent interest or memorability. Pick up New Moon instead, and his 90s stuff of course.

MY RATING: 3.8

 Elliott Smith - "Junk Bond Trader"

193. Devendra Banhart - Rejoicing in the Hands (2004)

 

Devendra Banhart is a hippie from San Francisco with a giant beard who just happens to make some excellent folk music. This album's greatest strength is its unpretentiousness--Banhart sings songs about his beard and people he knows and things like that. The melodies are tasteful without being boring (a hard thing to pull off--look at the depressing number of guys-with-a-guitar out there). This thing was produced by scary man and resident gothic genius Michael Gira, and even though this album, tonally, is pretty far from the Swans, it's easy to see what attracted him. Banhart's voice is fantastic, a wild quaver that almost singlehandedly pulls this album to the upper echelon of folk music records. It's tough to mention highlights on such an even record, but my personal favorite is probably "My Beard Is For Siobhan," which gains its power from the inexplicable foot-stomping hoedown Banhart tosses in at the end. A wonderful, subtle, underrated record. My little brother loves it.

MY RATING: 8.1

Devendra Banhart - "A Sight to Behold"