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"

79. Justin Timberlake - FutureSex/LoveSounds (2006)

This was certainly the most gigantically ambitious pop record of the decade; Timberlake was trying to make his Thriller with Timbaland to Michael's Quincy Jones, and he didn't quite succeed, but what's there is choice: the first half of this record is one of the most consistent runs of pop music anyone's pulled off yet, and even the second half has some amazing weirdness ("Losing My Way"? What the hell is that?). Weirdness is the order of the day here, with "Sexy Back" almost purposely annoying with its stuttering, whiny organ and incomprehensible vocal repetition. Timberlake almost seems to be channeling Trent Reznor's more funky stuff on the title track, and the two gigantic "suites" that sit in the center of the record are so perfectly written and arranged that time seems to stop as you listen to them. There is no more debased genre than MTV-friendly pop music, and anyone who attempts to revive it with real creativity and songwriting deserves kudos. Timberlake could have just recorded twelve more versions of "Cry Me A River" and called it a day; instead he recorded one of the longest, weirdest, catchiest, most confounding pop albums ever made. The album is so surprising that the two generic ballads ("Until the End of Time" and "Another Song (All Over Again)") are twice as disappointing when they finally show up. But hey--just skip 'em.

MY RATING: 9.0

Justin Timberlake - "Love Stoned - I Think She Knows (Interlude)"

80. The Clientele - Suburban Light (2000)

Suburban Light is one of the decade's great achievements of atmosphere, and it is all the more remarkable for the fact that it never really strays from the standard pop formula; it's easy enough to construct atmospherics if you've got ten minute-long tracks and progressive song structures to play with, but it's a heck of a lot harder if you're writing pop songs and all you're using are the standard drums, bass, vocals, guitar. This album is a kind of miracle: it perfectly encapsulates the hazy, rainy feeling of its cover, and it never deviates from it for a second. The band's discipline is such that each track adds to the experience and yet there are no songs that "stand out"; everything is very even; selecting a favorite track is impossible here. "From A Window" is a little bit faster than the rest and "Reflections After Jane" was the single, but pretty much any track could have been a single--the songs are that good. What also is impressive here is that this music evokes no specific era: it's 60s pop, it's 70s pop, there's even a little bit of the Smiths in there for your 80s pop. It exists in its own world, a world that was created for this album only and was never to be returned to again.

MY RATING: 9.3

The Clientele - "We Could Walk Together"

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"

83. Joanna Newsom - Ys (2006)

How many points do you give for ambition? I posit that there was no more ambitious record in the 00s than Joanna Newsom's Ys, five superlong tracks of basically nothing but harp and strings, five medieval story-songs with gorgeous lyrics. And look at the names who helped out on this album: Jim O'Rourke. Steve Albini. Van Dyke Parks. So far, so good, but there's one thing that stops people from appreciating Joanna Newsom and one thing only: her voice. It's odd. She sounds like Lisa Simpson. But, ladies and gentlemen, I'm here to praise it. I think her voice works perfectly with this kind of music; it's childlike, and that is essential. I feel like a more traditional voice would have killed this kind of music: the whole thing is so studiedly pretentious that it threatens to collapse in on itself any second and only Newsom's untrained voice stops it from doing so. And her voice makes these songs beautiful: somebody had to to take up the "strings in popular music" mantle after Dickon Hinchcliffe left the Tindersticks, and this album boasts the greatest string arrangements of any pop record since the Tindersticks' second album ten years previous. These songs are lengthy and complex, although not in the way you might expect: their construction and instrumentation are fairly simple (usually there's nothing more than a harp and strings) but their complexity comes through in their lyricism and subtle grading and lurching of volume: "Emily" and "Only Skin", both of which are well over ten minutes, reach gorgeous string-laden climaxes so subtly you hardly realize it until they're washing over you, and "Monkey & Bear" manages the astonishing feat of being somewhat catchy despite not having a coherent chorus or even sung vocals (most of them are spoken). What a crazy goddamned record, in short, and music is all the better for its existence.

MY RATING: 8.9

Joanna Newsom - "Monkey & Bear"

84. Super Furry Animals - Rings Around The World (2001)

Super Furry Animals are a pop consortium in the vein of the Beatles in that they'll try any musical style and use any idea (the comparison should end there, however). There's not a single thing they won't do, and on this album you've got an acoustic pop track that turns into a death metal song ("Receptacle for the Respectable") a countryish ballad that becomes an Aphex Twin-ish IDM track and several songs that sound like Broadway showstoppers ("Shoot Doris Day" and "It's Not The End of the World?"). It's impossible to describe exactly what a Super Furry Animals album sounds like because that changes track-to-track and even minute-to-minute, so all you can do is rate how well the songs work. I don't feel like this one is quite as successful as Radiator (which was their best collection of songs) or even Guerrilla (which was their best attempt at messing with genres) but it does have a better sense of sequencing: "Run, Christian Run!" has an honest-to-god epic guitar solo to close things out, and "Alternate Route to Vulcan Street" is a great, shimmery opener. The problem is that here the "wacky" effects occasionally crowd out the songs, which are weaker than those in the band's past, and too much time is wasted on inexplicable sound effects and noise that create no atmosphere and mostly serve as lip service to the band's eccentricity and to help bolster their "weird" credentials. These moments don't work, but the album mostly does and it's the rare pop record that is as ambitious in its sound as it is in its melody and songwriting.

MY RATING: 8.1

Super Furry Animals - "Receptacle for the Respectable"

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"

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"

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"

101. Franz Ferdinand - Franz Ferdinand (2004)

Franz Ferdinand's first album is one of the finest examples of a type of music that in the future is going to signify the 00s just as disco signified the late 70s and British Invasion signified the mid-60s: angular, Gang of Four-esque rock. What FF did to vary the formula was add a gigantic, ass-shaking low end (so heavy that in fact none other than Kanye West once called the band "white crunk") and catchier, Hollies-esque melodies. It's amazing how well-formed this is, and it's only a debut; only Bloc Party's first album beats it, I think, and only the Strokes come close. Everyone's heard "Take Me Out", but "Cheating on You" beats both the Vines and the Hives at their own game and the lyrics to "Michael" must have pissed off more than one idiotic jock-type who bought this record because of "Take Me Out". Granted, everything's not perfect: I've always thought the other gigantic single "This Fire" was too simplistic for its own good and "Come On Home" is pure filler. Also, the album's production is weak: playing this record back-to-back with the later FF albums just shows how much better their later ones sound (even though they never reached this level of songwriting again). A near-great album, even if it's one that people like to pile on for being "shallow"--but how "deep", exactly, are those early Beatles records, I ask you?

MY RATING: 8.8

Franz Ferdinand - "Jacqueline"

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"

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"

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"

112. Feist - The Reminder (2007)

This album edges dangerously close to the dreaded adult contemporary--the kind of music you listen to while drinking wine and considering art with your yuppie friends in a Whit Stillman-esque panorama of decadent wealth. The album cover doesn't do much to alter this conception. Feist's vocals throughout are kind of emotionless and pretty and the arrangements are simple, unobtrusive and--sigh--tasteful. I find this kind of record as pointless to hate as it it to love--only by using the most tortured Marxist criteria could you call the thing "bad", but it's not going to change anybody's life, either. The whole thing is just too cold and distant to be a classic--compare this record with Cat Power's far more spotty but much more emotionally tortured You Are Free. Several of these songs are so "atmospheric" and without melody that they pass by without any memory of even having existed at all ("The Park", "The Water") and "Sealion" is an annoying kids' track that should have been cut. But even I have to admit that the melody to the infamous "1234" is something special and "Honey Honey" is effectively austere and chilling. The result is a record that seeks to be professional above all things--how far you're able to stand that kind of thing is exactly how much you're going to like it.

MY RATING: 6.5

Feist - "My Moon My Man"

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"

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"

120. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - The Tyranny of Distance (2001)

Ted Leo and his band are no-frills. There is no attempt on this record to be anything else but a really good pop-punk group, and it's in this that Leo most resembles Elvis Costello, where his innovations were mostly taking a more modern aesthetic and marrying it to an older style. Although I prefer Leo to Costello--his songwriting seems less predictable and contrived. Also, a good seventy percent of these songs are great. The beginning is a little shaky, but once you hit "Timorous Me" the album just becomes one great track after another. Leo also shows his talent at sequencing--the gorgeous, two-minute folk track "The Gold Finch and the Red Oak" is perfectly placed after the propulsive riff-fest "My Vien Ilin". The album is free of the bizarre production choices that plagued the followup Hearts of Oak and, frankly, the songs are just better. Listen to that vibrate-y guitar bit that shows up in the verses of "St. John the Divine"! The Gaelic-sounding fiddley part at the end of "Timorous Me"! Leo is able to fill his songs with clever little bits that help them transcend mere catchiness, and it's this that tosses him to the top of the pack of the hundreds of groups out there that essentially sound just like this one. It won't ever be confused with a classic (it's too workmanlike for that)--it's just a group of excellent songs.

MY RATING: 8.6

Ted Leo and the Pharmacists - "Biomusicology"

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"

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

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

MY RATING: 9.1

PJ Harvey - "Big Exit"

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"