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"

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"

89. Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary (2005)

Wolf Parade stand at the center of a dizzying number of Canadian indie rock groups such as Sunset Rubdown, Frog Eyes, Swan Lake and the Handsome Furs and while a little more palatable, this stuff is much the same: synthy indie rock fronted by Dan Boeckner and/or Spencer Krug, both of whom sound like bleating goats and neither of whom I can distinguish from the other. This album is notably less "polished" than later albums but it's a lot less boring (their 2010 album Expo 86 is one of the most boring, pointless albums I've ever heard in my life). Listening to stuff like this only confirms my suspicion that the Talking Heads were the most important and influential rock group of the postpunk era: this stuff is basically Speaking in Tongues-era Heads with a little less synth and dance influence. The vocalists sound like nerds, the music is herky-jerky and angular and weird little synth noises poke in and out of the music occasionally--not enough to dance to but enough to make it so the band isn't just labeled a "punk" band. Do I like it? I do, sometimes--"Shine a Light" is great fist-pumping rock, "We Built Another World" has a great arrangement and is lyrically fascinating, and "I'll Believe in Anything" is a near-epochal single, the kind of thing that would have sounded perfect on a mid-90s modern rock station coming between Nirvana and Cake and and the Toadies and so forth. What it does it does very well, although it's a little retrograde--it's the same old modern rock stuff dressed up in a new outfit. But that's fine, and when there are enough great songs as there are on this album, I'm willing to forgive just about anything.

MY RATING: 7.8

Wolf Parade - "It's a Curse"

91. The New Pornographers - Mass Romantic (2000)

And now we see the dangers of the New Pornographers, the danger with their one-hundred-percent reliance on melody and arrangement as opposed to musicianship and atmospherics. If an NP song fails, it fails big time--while great New Pornographers is great music, bad New Pornographers is just unbearable. Tracks like "Mystery Hours", "To Wild Homes" and "Breakin' the Law" are almost worthless, their lack of a memorable melody leaving them as three-minute bits of nothing. The musicianship here is so faceless it could have been performed by robots--if there's a "sound" to this album it's big, candy-colored and irritating. Thankfully, there's some great stuff here: "Mass Romantic" has the band's first classic singalong coda, "The Fake Headlines" is another Carl Newman melody brought down from heaven, and "Letter From an Occupant" is four great songs twisted together and crammed into four minutes. Even these songs, though, hold little of interest outside of their melodies and arrangements: I find "Letter From an Occupant" near-unlistenable despite its obvious melodic brilliance. There is no sense of quietness or loudness here: everything is shoved at you at the same volume, and the entire thing just seems like the one-off it was intended to be at the time (which it wasn't, to our good fortune: the miracle record Twin Cinema was five years away). Some good songs, some bad songs, all bad presentation.

MY RATING: 6.5

The New Pornographers - "The Body Says No"

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"

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"

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"

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"

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"

115. The Shins - Oh, Inverted World (2001)

This is one record that's almost certainly going to be remembered more as a cultural artifact than anything approaching a great collection of music; while it's catchy enough, the thing is too low-key and mediocre overall to have done much if it hadn't been for a certain (annoying) character in a certain (terrible) movie saying that this band would "change your life". Well, no, seeing that there's more than enough groups out there who produce music just like this, and alleged "highlight" "New Slang" is disappointing, a mindlessly pretty acoustic track that's like Nick Drake with all the atmosphere sucked out. The more upbeat pop tracks generally fare better, and while there's hardly a song here I can remember once the thing's over, they certainly sound great while they're on. About one-sixth of this really short album is taken up with a minimal acoustic ditty called "The Past and Pending", and it's the best thing here, the only thing on the album that could be said to approach a truly timeless melody. The jury's still out (for me) on these guys: Chutes Too Narrow was great, Wincing the Night Away was awful, and this sits somewhere in the middle. It's pleasant, just don't expect it to change your life or anything. How could music this dementedly unpretentious ever change anything at all?

MY RATING: 6.2

The Shins - "Caring Is Creepy"

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"

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"

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"

128. Life Without Buildings - Any Other City (2001)

First of all: this is basically a hip-hop record. Don't go into it thinking it's "indie rock" in any conventional sense: there are no choruses and lead vocalist Sue Tompkins doesn't really sing, she mutters and rambles. Let's talk more about Sue Tompkins here, because she's the thing that prevents this album from being utterly forgettable, as musically it's nothing more than repetitive Belle and Sebastian-y vamps without melody. Tompkins, though, sounds like she's going insane in pretty much every track--her vocals sound like the nutty person on the street corner's ramblings set to music. The problem is that aside from that trick there isn't much else here at all--some of the tempos are slower ("Sorrow") and some of the tempos are quicker ("The Leanover") but overall it's the same method in every single track and your enjoyment of this record is going to depend completely upon whether or not you find it interesting or completely insufferable. I like it, mostly, and like this record whenever I'm listening to it, although I very rarely have a desire to do so. It's probably for the best these guys only released one album before breaking up: the world doesn't need two of what we have here.

MY RATING: 7.0

Life Without Buildings -  "The Leanover"

135. Sigur Rós - ( ) (2002)

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

MY RATING: 9.3

Sigur Ros - "6 (Untitled)"

140. TV on the Radio - Dear Science (2008)

For their fourth record TV on the Radio decided to drop a lot of their indie-rock associations and go in a more R&B/funk inspired direction. While lead vocalist Tunde Adebimpe is more than suited to such a stylistic change (and he's the only member of the band that comes out of this record still looking good--his vocals are uniformly great throughout), the band backing him up decidedly is not, and this record just ends up being an experiment that doesn't work. The first problem is the production--it's way, way too thin to be a "proper" funk record. Where's the bass? What's the deal with these processed, weak-ass drums? "Golden Age" is one of the ugliest-sounding things I've ever heard, a hideous "funky" thing that sounds like five different bands all playing at once (Actually, that description makes the song sound more interesting than it actually is). "Family Tree" is a maudlin, keyboard-drenched ballad, "Shout Me Out" is too minimalistic for its own good, and "Lover's Day", compared to the music made by actual funk groups, is laughable. Only "DLZ" works, and unsurprisingly it's the track on the album that hews closest to the style found on Return to Cookie Mountain. I respect what the band is trying to do here, and certainly this isn't a lazy or boring record at all, but the production choices are uniformly awful and it's hard to listen to this incredibly talented group laboring away at a style that just doesn't suit them at all. Worth a listen, but overall a real disappointment.

MY RATING: 5.9

TV on the Radio - "Love Dog"

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"

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"

150. The New Pornographers - Twin Cinema (2005)

Power pop is probably my least favorite type of music in the world. I like music that, for lack of a better phrase, creates some sort of coherent emotional world--and while that sounds complicated it really isn't. Music, of all the arts, is probably the one that works most on pure emotion. The problem with power pop, to me, is that it neglects everything else music can do in favor of one thing--melodies. That's it. Power pop is the quest for the catchy melody, and nothing else much matters. The New Pornographers are as guilty of this as anyone--I find Electric Version near-unlistenable, and it's a good lesson on what happens when a band neglects everything else in favor of melody. You stand on melody, and you fall on melody. If the melody isn't memorable, the rest of the song is worthless. But I don't know what the hell happened here, because Twin Cinema is, quite possibly, the greatest single collection of melodies on one album in the entire decade. The music--that is, the arrangements, the performances--are pretty middling. There's the neat stuttering part in "Falling Through Your Clothes", and the horns in "Stacked Crooked"--but that's about it. But God, the melodies! I don't know what family member A.C. Newman had to sacrifice to his god to come up with these, but even if it was his only son it was worth it. Surely I'm not the only one who repeatedly thought of Lennon/McCartney when these songs were playing. No other pop group even comes close to this level of melodic invention--each track contains so many gorgeous, intertwining chorus melodies that the level of complexity almost approaches progressive rock at times. Just listen to "Use It"! I count at least four melodies in that track that any other band would have killed to have written. These guys seem to get more acclaim these days for Mass Romantic, but this--this is the one. It even made me like power pop.

MY RATING: 9.5

The New Pornographers -  "The Bleeding Heart Show"