126. Mastodon - Leviathan (2004)

I don't know much about metal. I own the "masterpieces" of the genre and don't have much familiarity with anything outside those. I think Ride the Lightning is better than Master of Puppets and Slayer's Reign in Blood is better than both of them. Metal seems to exist entirely outside of most other types of music; there's very little, if any, cross-pollination between it and, say, "indie" or hip-hop or pop or whatever. This is somewhat by way of saying that the inclusion of Leviathan on this list smacks of tokenism--it's a great record, certainly, but it seems a little silly for them to include it when I find it hard to believe there are no other metal albums worthy of being on such a list. It seems like they felt that they had to put at least one metal album on a top 200 of the 00s list or nobody would take them seriously--a strange idea, since they managed to leave Metallica and Slayer off their 80s list, which to me is a far bigger omission (Mastodon are good, but this record's no Reign in Blood). Anyway, as for this one, all I can really say is that it's metal varied and well-composed enough to interest a non-metal fan (me). I was about 25 minutes into it before I consciously realized that the thing had been solidly kicking my ass for those entire 25 minutes without a break, and some of the record's best moments basically consist of one brilliant guitar riff after another, each following the previous one so rapidly your brain hardly has time to comprehend the power of the one that's been left behind. The effect is of an embarrassment of riches--like the band is so good at coming up with these riffs that they can afford to just throw them away. The band's strongest aspect, though, is Brett Dailor's drumming: the guy is clearly one of the best drummers alive, and at times the rest of the record almost seems to exist to justify his ridiculous fills. Anyway, if you are at all interested in metal, you undoubtedly already own this or have at least listened to it (it is without a doubt the most popular and critically respected metal album of the past 10 years). If you don't like metal, give it a try. It's about as good as a limited genre can possibly get.

MY RATING: 8.8

Mastodon - "I Am Ahab"

127. Sleater-Kinney - The Woods (2005)

This motherfucker is loud. The mix is so distorted and in-the-red that it rivals, and possibly surpasses, Iggy Pop's infamous remix of Raw Power (which I prefer to the original, btw) as the loudest single piece of music I've ever heard. For this record Sleater-Kinney largely dropped any semblance of "punk", instead settling for gigantic, terrifying exercises of guitar that almost approach Jimi Hendrix in their ferocity. Opening track "The Fox" barely seems to hold together outside of its unbelievable volume, but that's what makes it thrilling--you're basically too busy scraping your brain off the back wall from the power of that colossal opening chord to even think about whether it's a "good song" or not. And that's a good thing, because the songwriting here is, in general, far weaker than their preceding record. There are no bad tracks, but the songs are a lot more pedestrian than I was used to hearing from Sleater-Kinney--most of these tracks are basically generic riff-fests that could have been written by pretty much anyone. "Jumpers", in addition to sharing a title with a Third Eye Blind track, is about as generic. But I'm willing to throw a lot of that aside out of sheer respect for the sound on this record--while I assume audiophiles will tear their hair out upon hearing it (some tracks are so loud they devolve into static) I love it because when turned up high enough, it sounds like a goddamned jet engine. If there's no place in this world for insanely loud music, you can count me out.

MY RATING: 8.4

Sleater-Kinney - "The Fox"

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???)

157. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow (2003)

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

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

Lightning Bolt - "On Fire"

198. Boris - Akuma no Uta (2003)

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

MY RATING: 9.1

Boris - "Akuma no Uta"