GUEST: Chris's Top 15 Albums of the Decade

Hello internet, hi hello konnichiwa.  So Carrington asked me to do this best albums of the 00s list under the assumption that I have good taste in music, and I’m kind of worried that it may not reflect such an assumption in practice.  It’s going to include the stuff I liked the most over the course of the decade, weighed on some subjective sliding scale balancing how much I liked it at the time and how much I like it now.  Also, before you start reading, you should know that this list will not contain any Radiohead.  I just never got into Radiohead.  Sorry.

Oh, and I hope this doesn’t look too much like the Pitchfork list.

Alright, let’s get into it: 

15)  Silversun Pickups – Carnavas

Usually I care a lot about a rock band’s lyrics.  After a few listens I can sing along with most of the album.  Not so much at times with Silversun Pickups, maybe because they don’t always make a lot of sense, but it’s actually not a problem at all.  They get the atmospheric rock thing down very well, and the basslines and hooks are tight enough to just groove along with even without the vocals.  And I actually think it’s pretty clever when they do the minute-long outro in “Dream at Tempo 119” only to burst back in with another verse beginning with “I couldn’t end it there.”  I need a little more time to really evaluate this one, I think, but it’s definitely quite a solid rock album if you’re into that kind of thing.

14)  The Blood Brothers – Burn, Piano Island, Burn

In all honesty, I would probably hate these guys if I hadn’t seen them live before hearing the record.  Whatever freaky nightmare world Piano Island is located in is probably home to a lot of the kids that shop at Hot Topic, and the back-and-forth vocals kind of sound like all those Hot Topic kids screeching in unison.  But it’s somehow really catchy.  I don’t know what the word for it is.  Raw, maybe?  Yeah, let’s go with raw.  They also have a song that I’m fairly certain is loosely based on one of my favorite short stories (“The Salesman Denver Max,” based on Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”), so props for that.

13)  Minus The Bear – Highly Refined Pirates

Minus The Bear’s kind of a one-trick pony, but that’s not such a bad thing if it’s a good trick.  Guitarist Dave Knudsen’s two-hand tapping guitar technique really drives the band, and I think his skills are best displayed on Highly Refined Pirates, an album about racing yachts and bumming around in Paris and various other key elements of living the good life.   They’re not popular in many circles for basically coming off as a bunch of frat douches, which might not be too far from the truth, but what can I say?  I dig the aesthetic they’re workin’ on.

12)  Junior Senior – Hey Hey My My Yo Yo

So a skinny straight guy and a fat gay guy walk into a bar in Denmark.  Then a funk band comes from somewhere and they all ROCK YOUR DAMN FACE OFF.  Yeah, look, I know it’s not smart music or anything with lines like “Hello darlin’/pardon my French/we been lookin for a guy with a monkey wrench/Talkin’ trash/into a can/onto a record/and then you can dance.”  But sometimes you just gotta dance, right?

11)  Jens Lekman – Night Falls Over Kortedala

I wonder what they put in the water in Scandinavia to make everyone so happy despite the gross weather.  There’s a weird unbridled joy in most of Jens Lekman’s music, replete with sweeping harps and jazzy basslines and goofy barbershop quartet backup vocals, even when he’s singing ostensibly sad songs like “I’m Leaving You Because I Don’t Love You” and “If I Could Cry (It Would Feel Like This).”  Dude carries a certain naiveté about him that’s kind of disarming and pretty great to listen to.  Can’t wait to see what the Swedish boy wonder does next.

10)  Junior Boys – Last Exit

I actually feel pretty weird about putting this so high on the list, but it really is an amazing album.  It’s atmospheric without being boring, occasionally danceable, and always has a mysterious and sort of ethereal quality to it.  It’s perfect night driving music.  My favorite electronic album of the past 10 years for sure.  Why didn’t these guys get in the UPS commercials instead of the Postal Service?  Don’t you realize you’re just giving publicity to the competition???

9)   Ted Leo and the Pharmacists – The Tyranny of Distance

Ted Leo is pretty much what every musician should try to be, I think.  Consistently excellent live shows, pretty frequent album releases, and on top of his game when it comes to the issues.  Dude’s a consummate professional.  And he did a Halloween show as Glenn Danzig, playing only Misfits/Danzig songs and not breaking character the entire time.  Seriously, how do you not love that?  Anyway, it’s hard to pick a favorite between this and Hearts of Oak for this spot, but I have to give Tyranny the edge because I think the guitar work is just a little more interesting.  One of the few legit guitar masters in indie rock, that Ted Leo.

On a semi-related note, there’s something that’s always bugged me about the Pitchfork review of the Ted Leo album Shake the Sheets, which did not make this list.  The reviewer says, “You find yourself strangely aggravated by Leo's characteristic punk-scat; especially unforgivable is a Jacko-like "shebooyah" in "Walking to Do".  Aoyama and Shibuya are places in Japan and I’m 98% certain that is what Ted Leo is talking about in this particular song.  EARN YOURSELF SOME GEOGRAPHY, PFM.

8)   Cursive - Domestica

Screeching, discordant guitars and much wailing and gnashing of teeth about a relationship that apparently involved a lot of screeching, discord, wailing, and gnashing of teeth.  David Byrne once said that the worse someone sings, the easier it is to believe what they’re saying, so it’s pretty easy to take Tim Kasher seriously on this album as he’s tears apart the power dynamics and other foundations of, well, everyone’s relationships, I guess.  I sometimes feel a little ripped off by albums that are only 9 tracks long, but I think it works here.  Spending any more time with Sweetie and Pretty Baby would be too much.  Maybe that’s where they went wrong in the first place.

Fun story, Kasher was incredibly drunk while performing one particular Cat’s Cradle show and referred to The Blood Brothers (the openers that night) as “The Blood Buddies.”  This is still hilarious to me.

7)   Coheed and Cambria – Good Apollo, I’m Burning Star IV

Alright, so maybe this is a little shameful, but just shut up about it okay?  I just really dig any band who will shamelessly bust out riffs that sound completely stolen from Rush or Iron Maiden, and Coheed delivers these in spades!  I think this is probably my favorite album of theirs because Claudio Sanchez finally learned to stop sounding like a girl at all times and the big Willing Well series at the end is a pretty epic little chunk of proggy goodness culminating in some kind of bizarre steel guitar-fueled hoedown.  I could really give a shit about the associated sci-fi comic books and all that, I’m just in it for the movie trailer-approved catchy faux-metal riff bonanza.  And if that’s not good enough for you well you can just KISS MY GRITS, SALLY.

6)   The Wrens – The Meadowlands

When you have that first big high school/college breakup, this is the kind of album you need to have on hand to help you wallow in your misery.  In that respect, I guess it’s kind of like a modern-day Pet Sounds, except with fewer harmonies.  Aside from the couple songs about touring with your band, the whole album is just a big parade of misery and bitterness that somehow never becomes overbearing.  Additionally 13 Months in 6 Minutes may be the saddest song ever written.  There’s so much helplessness and despair and disappointment contained in that song that it’s really just impossible for me not to listen to it multiple times, secretly hoping that our narrator hero will figure something out the second time through.  About a minute from the end, there’s a big crescendo that changes the whole mood of the song, and it’s just enough to give you a little hope that he’s sprinting to the airport to stop his dream girl from getting on the plane after saying goodbye for what he knows will be the last time.  He never does, but you get the sense he’s come to terms with it.  Yeah, maybe it’s not romantic, but it’s real at least.

5)   Andre Nickatina – Conversation with a Devil

This is my favorite hip hop album of all time.  Almost certainly not the best, but my favorite.  In case you are not familiar with Mr. Nickatina, well, don’t feel too bad because I still am not either.  He’s a San Francisco Bay Area rapper who makes a ton of records and a lot of them aren’t all that well-made.  He might be big in San Francisco, but I’m not even clear on that.  But Conversation with a Devil, man… there’s just something about it.  It’s like rooting for the ragtag group of misfits in Mighty Ducks or something. 

The album is apparently the soundtrack to a movie he made that’s kind of a Scarface knockoff, and it kinda follows the general plot of: guy sells a lot of drugs and has a pretty sweet time doing it, gets set up by his friend and goes to jail, does some time and gets out of the drug game.  It seems to me the album conveys the point better than the movie would, though.  Andre Nickatina doesn’t really have a powerful rap voice, but somehow it fits with his lyrical style, which is somehow braggadocios but still down to earth.  The beats are unusually melodic, perfectly produced, and have instrumentation ranging from minimal, fuzzy bass to acoustic guitar arpeggios to bagpipes.  It’s unlike any hip hop record I’ve heard before or since.  And by the end of the record, you feel like you know this guy—just an everyday dude telling his story.  I mean, look at that album art.  You think Jay-Z would even put that on one of his mixtapes?

4)   Jon Brion – Meaningless

Jon Brion is mostly known for being a producer and for scoring Charlie Kaufman films and I Heart Huckabees these days, but this is about as close to a perfect pop album as you’re gonna find.  It’s funny, catchy, and has a little bit of that ol’ emotional resonance to boot.  “Walking Through Walls” also has the absolute most cheerful way to say “motherfucker” in recent memory.  I that contend you could play it on the radio – who could be offended?  Some PopMatters reviewer named David Medsker called this the Album of the Decade back when it came out in 2001.  Turns out he might be right.

3)   The Mountain Goats – We Shall All Be Healed

I’m one of those people who always liked John Darnielle better with a band and decent production value instead of a 4-track recorder droning away in the background.  If you are also one of these people, this is the album for you!  Cotton and Palmcorder Yajna are two of my all-time favorite lyrical songs, but there really isn’t a weak one on the whole album.  It’s kind of weird to see The Mountain Goats live and watch John cheerfully recount his days as a junkie in his Mitch-Hedberg-on-Ecstacy banter style before playing any of these songs, but I think that’s part of the charm of it maybe.  The guy can make you smile as he’s making you feel about the stickpins in the cotton that he left in the top drawer.  Poor little fellers.

BONUS FUN FACT:  I once tried to write a short story based on the song Against Pollution, about a liquor store clerk who shoots a would-be robber in the face, but eventually decided against it because I felt like I didn’t know enough about liquor stores or shooting people in the face.

2)   The Avalanches – Since I Left You 
There are some albums that you should really only listen to straight through, and I think this TOE-TAPPIN’, HEAD BOBBIN’ CLASSIC is one of them.  I have a hard time separating the tracks from one another in my head (aside from Frontier Psychiatrist, which is really a monster unto itself), and I think that’s the real strength of The Avalanches – so many little disparate parts combine to form a thing so cohesive you can’t even tell where one track ends and another begins.  If you’ve never heard their Australian Breezeblock mixes, do yourself a favor and check those out—it’s the best we have until they decide to put out another proper album. 

1)      Modest Mouse – The Moon & Antarctica

My freshman and sophomore years of high school, I was really into pop punk.  The Ataris, The Vandals, all that stuff.  I forgot where I actually heard of Modest Mouse in the first place, but this album was the catalyst for my interest in the broader “indie rock” genre and is really responsible for a lot of my musical taste from 2001 onward.  So like, 95% of the rest of the stuff on this list.  When all you’ve been exposed to musically is Jimmy Buffett, Kenny Loggins, and the Warped Tour crowd, a song like The Stars Are Projectors is pretty mindblowing.  Nearly ten years later, and it’s still just as good.  Which is to say, really, really, really good.