191. Air - Talkie Walkie (2004)

This is, without a doubt, the single most gorgeous album on this entire 2000s list. It's an album to fall in love to; an album to stare at sunsets to. What Air have done here is take everything gorgeous about 80s pop and soft rock and jettison everything cheesy and sentimental and produce a near-masterpiece. It's the best thing they've ever done--the more famous Moon Safari, while great, doesn't have the melodic and emotional directness that this one does. Hardly a second is given over to aimless "pretty" synthesizers, as would become a problem on later Air releases, and every bit of it is filled up music that is simultaneously light and deep. I have no idea how they did this. Air have always stood on the edge of the proverbial knife--their music is always just this close to being kitsch, the kind of stuff they play to ease your pain while your teeth are being yanked out. Not this time. Just listen to something like "Venus"--never before have I heard a song that so openly courts derisive laughter, the lyrics in their entirety being the following: "You could be from Venus/I could be from Mars/We would be together/Lovers forever/Care for each other/You could live in the sea/And I could be a bird/We would be together/Lovers forever/Care for each other/if you were an illusion/I would make it real/We would be together/Lovers forever/Care for each other/If you walk in the sun/I would be your shadow/We would be together/Lovers forever." That ain't Shakespeare, but how Air make it work is to eschew all "emotion" in the lyrics, reciting them like robots, so that the words themselves become sounds, almost a religious chant. The song is, quite simply, one of the most beautiful things I've ever heard in my life. #191? Shamefully low. Buy this album. Give it to your girlfriend and she will marry you. I guarantee it (not a guarantee).

MY RATING: 9.7

Air - "Venus"

192. Art Brut - Bang Bang Rock & Roll (2005)

If there was ever a record that didn't need a follow-up, it was this one; Art Brut's insanely arch, ironic first album is almost entirely self-contained, featuring an opening track about forming a band and a track near the end about breaking one up. This is probably the most meta rock album ever made, it's about nothing else than rock music itself. Most reviews of Art Brut degenerate into a quote-fest of the album's most memorable lines, and indeed it's full of them. The music itself is a bunch of energetic punk that's been ripped off a million times before and undoubtedly will be reused a hundred times after; it's hardly Art Brut's fault that the guitar riffs they're using have come from the minds of others. It even seems appropriate, given the album's subject matter. Picking a "favorite song" is an exercise in futility since it's all of a piece, but I have a soft spot for "Modern Art", basically because it cracks me up the most consistently ("Modern art...makes me...want to...ROCK OUT!!!" is undoubtedly one of the most kickass moments in rock music this decade).  Critical opinion on this album has kind of soured since it came out five years ago, probably because the whole thing's a sort of shallow joke. But that doesn't mean it isn't entertaining. It's short, it's catchy, it's funny, and for these guys, that's enough.

MY RATING: 7.5

Art Brut - "Modern Art"

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"

194. Pulp - We Love Life (2001)

This album wasn't supposed to be this good. Pulp were, by all standards, washed up; their best work was far behind them, and I was one of the few who thought This Is Hardcore was basically an ambitious misfire. Jarvis Cocker's propensity for favoring drama over melody had finally caught up with him, and while "I Spy" was a great enough song on the relatively varied Different Class, with This Is Hardcore we had an entire album of "I Spy"s. To make matters worse, the band had enlisted Scott Walker to produce the record, and as everyone who's heard the man's albums knows, Scott Walker is good at many things, but he is not good at melody. So how the hell did this happen? We Love Life is Pulp's most melodic and well-composed album in six years, even giving their 1993-1995 work a run for its money. It's just great rock music, rousing and beautiful in all the right places, with a marked pastoral influence that shows itself in tracks like "Weeds", "Wickerman" and "Roadkill". Ironically enough, the tracks most reminiscent of Pulp's earlier material ("Bob Lind", "Bad Cover Version") are the weakest; the band slides so effectively into this new, more acoustic incarnation that they seem to have been doing it their whole career.  It takes a damn good record to make a title like "We Love Life" seem non-ironic, and even harder if you're Pulp. Probably the best swan song of the decade, and a great surprise to find it on this list.

MY RATING: 8.7

Pulp - "Sunrise"

195. Bonnie "Prince" Billy - The Letting Go (2006)

Basically a more pastoral cousin of Billy's 1999 masterpiece I See a Darkness; thus it largely avoids the depression and weirdness of that one in favor of a string-drenched, "pretty" folkiness (with female backing vocals). Sometimes this works, and is unbelievably gorgeous ("Then The Letting Go", "No Bad News") and sometimes it degenerates into endless, tuneless nonsense ("God's Small Song"). The two best tracks on this album by far are the most reminiscent of his previous work, probably not coincidentally. "Strange Form of Life" has probably the single most heart-rending guitar riff of the entire decade, and "The Seedling" is pretty terrifying. It's probably worth picking this thing up for those two tracks alone, but it's kind of depressing to see such an iconoclastic artist systematically remove all the things that made him special, all the things that once separated him from every other wispy-voiced troubadour with an acoustic guitar.

MY RATING: 6.8

Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - "Strange Form of Life"

196. William Basinski - The Disintegration Loops I-IV (2001)

This one can't be reviewed quite like other albums; it's as much about the process of making the music as the music itself. This thing is nearly five hours, by far the longest album on this list, with the opening track alone lasting over an hour. And it's a five-second loop of an (admittedly gorgeous) electronic melody, repeated over and over again. The rest of the tracks follow the same pattern. Basinski was transferring these loops, most of which were close to fifteen years old, to tape when he realized the tape was disintegrating as he was making the transfer. The music itself is dying as you listen to it. Loops drop out and become distorted, change, fill with static, collapse to nothingness. This is a work of art in which music and concept are so utterly intertwined they could not be separated without killing both, like Siamese twins. It's profound, it's boring. It is not "music" in the conventional sense; its progression (or regression, I suppose) comes not from the aesthetics of any human being but from the randomness of a dying machine, the natural destructiveness of nature. It's half-music. But how much can any of us say we control ourselves? Perhaps Basinski is simply being more honest here, but coming right out and saying exactly how it was chance and nature, and not his own mind, that constructed this music. How strange that what is probably the simplest album on this list, musically, conceals the profoundest depths.

MY RATING: 9.6

William Basinski - "D | P 1.1 (excerpt)"
(note: of all the albums on this list, this one is probably the least effectively served by a sample. It really should be experienced in full, or it won't make much sense. Trust me, it's worth it.)

197. Yeasayer - All Hour Cymbals (2007)

I first heard this album the same day I first viewed Terrence Malick's classic film Days of Heaven, so there will probably always be a connection in my mind between the alternately bucolic and apocalyptic vision of the film and the gorgeous, psychedelic sound of this album's best tracks. The album's marriage between pop and psychedelia brings to mind most readily stuff on Nuggets II, but since this is an indie album made by New Yorkers in the 2000s, there's a strong dance element. It sounds like a new-century update of the Eastern-style stuff everyone was doing in the 60s, mixed with elements of the kind of campfire-singalong thing that Animal Collective was trying to do on Sung Tongs, except more successful (not that Animal Collective didn't immediately redeem themselves with their next record). The first four tracks set a standard that the rest of the album can't reach, however, and there's a noticeable drop-off in quality after the creepy lyrics and wheezy accordion of "Germs". The second half is basically the same as the first half minus the good melodies, so at least you've got an interesting enough atmosphere to groove on, if nothing else. Still, the first four tracks are glorious, almost revelatory, and about as good as pop music got this decade. Definitely worth hearing, and it's nice to see this band get some commercial success with their follow-up.

MY RATING: 8.0

Yeasayer - "Sunrise"