So, the overdue conclusion to all this shit, Racecar Brown's top ten albums of the decade...
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In the wake of records like the utterly forgettable So Divided, the disappointing Worlds Apart, and the not-quite comeback Century of Self it's easy to look back at ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead's Source Tags & Codes through the exact opposite of rose-colored glasses. It becomes a sort of blame system for these other albums, and mostly because you can see the direct lines between Source Tags' best moments and those other albums' worst.
After all, the almost childish dramaticism of "The Rest Will Follow" could be seen just off the shore of "Relative Ways", and the overblown production of "Life" is only a short jog from "Heart In the Hand of the Manner". In a way, it's simply easier to reject Source Tags & Codes based on the material that followed it. We felt duped, in a way. With those following albums, Trail of Dead transmuted the angry, kicking catharsis of their seminal release into painfully awkward teenage philosophy.
But, when Source Tags first came out, it was angry, kicking catharsis, and of the highest degree. The passion and earnestness turned what could have been cringe-worthy sentiments like "My life is haunted by young devilry" and turned them anthemically life-affirming; it was okay to be completely melodramatic if you could back it up with the raging guitar squalls of "Homage" or punishing piano stabs of the aforementioned "Heart In the Hand of the Matter". And even though the subsequent material has attempted to recontextualize the angsty honesty of Source Tags it's tracks like the bluesy explosion of the closing title track that should stand above such now-disdainful sniffs.
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2002 was an absolutely stellar year for music. Yes, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was released for streaming in '01, but it saw its official release early the following year, and stood besides giants like Interpol's Turn On the Bright Lights, the Notwist's Neon Golden (two excellent records that just missed this list) and, also number ten on this list, Source Tags & Codes. In a way, 2002 represented a climax for each of these bands. While Wilco and the Notwist in particular have released solid to almost-spectacular albums since then, none of those four bands have been able to reach again their heady 2002 peaks.
Wilco, of course, simply couldn't have made something approximating YHF again. Not because they didn't have the talent, but because it was such a unique convergence; Jim O'Rourke getting involved, Jay Bennett overstaying his welcome just long enough to make a lasting mark, Glenn Kotche taking over drumming duties, and of course Jeff Tweedy, who never sounded quite so hopeful and broken at the same time as on this record.
Hopeful and broken are two words that describe Yankee Hotel Foxtrot well, whether it be lyrically ("I'd be lyin' if I said it wasn't easy/I am tryin' to break your heart") or musically (the wilting but vibrant strings of "Jesus, Etc."). Even in the depths of the funereal "Rado Cure", light shines in with the bright keyboard tones of the song's chorus, and even though the album ends on two downtrodden piano ballads in "Poor Places" and "Reservations", there's a slight smile on your face as those last notes fade away and fifteen seconds of silence end the album. It was a pause to realize just how towering the highs of 2002 were.
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Everybody breaks down at some point in their lives. It's pretty much impossible not to in an American society that predicates strength. Humans just simply aren't designed to deal with that much stress all the time, so even if its hidden, everyone breaks. In a way, it helps to make us stronger; we know then where are breaking points are, can deal with them better. We also know how far we can push ourselves before having to take a step back, a deep breath, and an ol' fashion count to ten.
Xiu Xiu's music represents the moments in which we forget that, the moments where we do break. It doesn't so much revel in them as explain them, where a single cymbal crash or one of Jamie Stewart's throat-tearing yelps can define the moment between being okay and being, well, not. In a way, this musical explanation can be as helpful as counting to ten. The old adage is that misery loves company, but it's more accurate to say misery loves sympathy, and Xiu Xiu's ability to soundtrack a breakdown provides that kind of sympathy, never more accurately or devastatingly as on Fabulous Muscles
A single 8-bit bleep opens the album, followed by a long pause that leaves the listener uncertain and possibly confused. It's just long enough to want to check your MP3 for data corruption. But then "Crank Heart" begins in earnest and, despite its cheerful synth melodies, something sinister lies just below the surface that explodes in the chorus. Similarly "Clowne Towne"'s bloorping synth lines are bubbly, but Jamie Stewart's agonizingly restrained vocal performance lends the track a crushing weight. Throughout its length, Fabulous Muscles reminds listeners of how breakdown can (usually does) follow our highest moments. And in that it's possible to find welcomed sympathy.
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On the song "We Major", the dreamy celebration track of Late Registration, Kanye laughs in the middle, "So they ask me, "Why you call it Late Registration 'Ye?" 'Cause we takin' these motherfuckers back to school." Kanye's second album was always a companion piece to The College Dropout (far moreso than Graduation related to either of them), even down to Cedric the Entertainer's teacher character opening both records, so taking it back to school seemed a natural progression, and took more meanings than one on the record, like when Kanye promised his mother that he'd go back to school himself on "Hey Mama".
It's always been that duality of Kanye's that has made him an intriguing rapper, an intriguing person, and it was never more in practice than on Late Registration. He turned the idea of going back to school into something both derisive and respectful, just how he flipped the script on the idea of "Gold Digger" when he admitted that, even if you stay by your man all the way through his rise, he'll probably "leave your ass for a white girl," or how he snorted that "Since 'Pac passed away/Most you rappers don't even deserve a track from me" shortly after admitting that he "was having nervous breakdowns/Like, 'Damn these niggas that much better than me?'"
Musically, the addition of Jon Brion, who would later help Fiona Apple craft an absolutely monstrous version of Extraordinary Machine that was unfortunately scrapped and exists only in data packets, added a whole other dimension to Kanye's already stellar production work. Strings swooped to legitimize the use of Otis Redding on "Gone", keyboards burbled up to give a weed-smoke haze to "We Major", and blooming synths and glittering marimba made "Hey Mama" a tear-jerker long before Donda West's tragic passing. So, yeah, Kanye took us back to school. I guess we can determine which meaning to take of that.
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There's something intangible about Illinois that makes many people want to not like it. Part of it is indie-world ubiquity; nothing can make a hipster feel less hip than liking exactly what everyone else likes, as it's a counterculture built on liking some nebulous other that, man, you just don't get it, man. But part of it, too, was a kind of jealousy. A lot of indie music fans are musicians themselves that took one listen to the orchestral splendor that populated Sufjan's second entry into his now-defunct 50 States Project and thought helplessly, "I could never make something like this." I know that's how I felt.
But Illinois is hard to dislike if you respect the album as a unit of art. It's immaculately sequenced, allowing for a natural ebb and flow. It's also wonderfully orchestrated, pulling instruments out and dropping them in at all the right times, never sounding cluttered or barren. Even though it clocks in at twenty-two tracks and lasts for over seventy minutes, it never feels overly long or too ambitious. Even separately track listing "One Last 'Woo-Hoo!' For the Pullman" seems more amusing than pretentious.
Where on Michigan Sufjan seemed to fall into the depths of his cultivated mood, Illinois sees him exploring a wider variety of emotions. He still has his moments of serene affectation, like on "Casimir Pulaski Day" or "The Predatory Wasp of the Palisades Is Out to Get Us!", but the garage-rock of "The Man of Metropolis Has Stole Our Hearts" is as frenetic as Sufjan has ever got, and "Come On! Feel the Illinoise" is a joyous celebration of the state that Michigan never got. It'd be a lot easier to hate Illinois for being so well-crafted, calling it soulless or over-considered, but it's simply too good.
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The idea behind Black Sheep Boy's titular character came from a song by a near-forgotten 1960s singer-songwriter named Tim Hardin, whose second album included "Black Sheep Boy", the song that inspired Okkervil River's primary songwriter Will Sheff, enough that the Black Sheep Boy album actually opens with a stripped-down cover of Hardin's song, setting the tone for the bleak, heartrending journey when Sheff sings hopelessly "Please understand that the black sheep can wear the golden fleece and hold a winning hand."
Like many concept albums this decade, particularly in indie music, Black Sheep Boy was more concerned with using its concept to sharpen its emotional edge, how Phil Elvrum's Mount Eerie had done two years earlier and Of Montreal and the Antlers would imitate in the coming years. But where Elvrum and Barnes obfuscated their pain in ridiculous characters, Silberman and Sheff took a different route, tapping so acutely into their character's emotions so as to make listening as close to actively feeling that hurt yourself as they could.
Songs like the epic "So Come Back, I Am Waiting", the violent "In a Radio Song", and closer "A Glow" scrape against the bone musically as much as Sheff's words do lyrically across the span of the whole album, but the band wisely buoys Sheff's fatalism with a more upbeat middle section that brings Sheff into the clever fairy tale wordplay of "A King and A Queen" and "A Stone". But even those songs reveal a disturbingly familiar intimacy that one can't quite shake, as if Sheff was writing about your own love life. His talents made everyone into the black sheep boy, a prospect as terrifying and confusing as the last haphazard guitar plinks that end the album.
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Bands typically receive hype in the United States due to something we've heard. Some small sampling has whet our palettes and we've found that taste so enticing that we're eagerly waiting for the next bite, one that often ends up being not nearly as satisfying. But in 2001 the Strokes had gained hype mostly through the British press. File sharing wasn't as easy then, so trying to convince yourself to drop seven bucks on The Modern Age EP was a difficult argument, so many were simply waiting with to hear these "saviors of rock and roll" on their debut album.
I heard the Strokes before Is This It? came out. Not through any sort of musical searching, but by luck. I first heard the song "Last Night", strangely, on MTV, through an honest-to-God actual music video! It had that simple, dry garage-rock stomp, those raw, crooning vocals, and a fucking bluesy guitar solo! I thought those only existed on my dad's old vinyl records! It was exciting and surprising, a sort of revelation.
The Strokes wouldn't change the world like the hype would have had you believed. What they did was bring rock and roll to a new generation, right when it was becoming thought of as passé. Gritty vocal performances marked "Soma" and "Take It or Leave It" even if Julian Casablancas sounded like he was singing from inside a brick wall. Incessantly catchy guitar riffs populated the whole damn album, with melodies that set toes everywhere a-tappin'. And songs like "The Modern Age", "Someday", and "Hard to Explain" proved that maybe the hype was the tiniest bit deserved. Is This It? may not have changed rock music forever, but it reminded us of the fact that, when paired with great songwriting, the genre's power was undeniable.
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For those unfamiliar with the story, let me just recount the two most incredible points here. The Blueprint was recorded in under two weeks. The lyrics for The Blueprint were written in two fucking days, not on paper, but on the back of Jay-Z's. Think about the setting. Inspired by upcoming trials on counts of assault and gun possession, and beefs with Nas and Mobb Deep, Jigga retreats to the studio to spit an hour's worth of rhymes that include only a single guest spot (the absolutely murderous Eminem appearance on "Renegade").
It's difficult to even imagine the sort of divine creativity that Hov tapped into over the course of those two days, where internal rhymes had to have poured out of him like sweat on the studio floor, while he juxtaposed the clever female anthem "Girls, Girls, Girls" with the sensitive love song "Song Cry", and "U Don't Know"'s braggadocio with the almost helpless admittance of "Never Change", "I'm still fuckin' with crime 'cause crime pays."
This was the album that made Kanye West, of course, and for good reason as tracks like "Izzo (H.O.V.A.)" and "Never Change" imbued so much soul against Jay's disaffected delivery that it effectively changed the production game, but Hova's tour de force is untouchable. Even when he shows a chink in his armor, like on "Song Cry" or when you can hear the incredulity when he asks "You knew me for four records, you never disrespected me/Now that I'm successful you pull this shit?" it's balanced out by his vicious wordplay, the type that almost ended Nas' career and did end Mobb Deep's. Oh, by the way, did I mention he wrote this shit in two days?
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Starting the year 2000 Modest Mouse were just this strange, discordant band that had become indie music's most defining act of the late '90s, with the cacophonous dissonance of records This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing to Think About and its more fully-formed follow-up The Lonesome, Crowded West. Then the band signed to a major label, Epic Records, and people didn't know what the fuck to think.
There wasn't much to suggest this band would eventually write "Float On". The closest they had come to radio-ready was the overt catchiness of "Polar Opposites" or the gentle beauty "Trailer Trash". So why did a major label want them? Why did they want a major label? The fear, of course, was that the label was going to neuter the band's sound, subverting the more interesting aspects of their work and turning them into Nickelback with a lisp.
The sellout questions were temporarily suspended when the band released their first record for Epic, The Moon and Antarctica. It was different than their first two records, but if anything it was weirder, with Isaac Brock singing about stars projecting our lives, lives being like weeds, and weeds were... what? Baby-cum-angels, maybe? And musically, the band pushed their earlier sounds to their logical extremes. The DNA of "3rd Planet" and "Paper Thin Walls" was found in "Heart Cooks Brain", and the branches of "Dark Center of the Universe" and "What People Are Made Of" were offshoots of "Cowboy Dan" or "Doin' the Cockroach". But the record was also something new, especially the enormity of "The Stars Are Projectors" and "Life Like Weeds". While their next album would be what some feared, The Moon and Antarctica stood as a testament to what a unique band could do with major label money.
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The number one choice on this list really fucking obvious. There's a part of me that's incredibly contrarian and would have liked nothing more than to put some obscure shit in this slot, or do something crazy like big-upping Usher's Confessions. The fact of the matter is, though, that this decade was the one where I actually started getting into underground music in the first place. Obviously from these lists you've seen that I've since re-expanded my tastes to include a lot of the music that I may have once considered below me, but there was a beginning point and it was Kid A
Kid A is a great record, an album that changed a lot of people's opinions on what music could be at a very early point in the decade. It crossed a lot of boundaries that people weren't ready to cross; a rock band making electronic music doesn't sound so weird now (See: The Big Pink), but was practically unheard of ten years ago. It's also brilliantly paced, its claustrophobic energy manifesting in the tense strings of "How To Disappear Completely", the off-kilter drumbeat of "Morning Bell", those strange vocalization on "Everything In Its Right Place", and that claustrophobia balanced by the gritty attack of "Optimistic" or the outright dance catharsis of "Idioteque"
And there's been so much about how Kid A is representative of the times, the insular paranoia, the simultaneous fear and embrace of technology, the meta-commentary of an album about the computer age made with computers, how the obscured vocals that decorated the album were an analogy for how much communication was becoming less personal as the technology made it easier to connect. And that's all true, too. And interesting. But the reason I chose Kid A at number one has absolutely nothing to do with that. It's because of the simple fact that Kid A led me to where I am now, as someone who listens to music it.
The first time I listened to it was to review it for my High School newspaper and I loved it. But I didn't understand it. It never occurred to me that it was different, that it was making these philosophical statements. It was just something new, something engaging, something surprising and impressive. When I played it for my friends, they looked at me as if I had sprouted a second head. But I just couldn't get over the robot vocals on the title track, or stop the chill down my spin when Yorke asks to "cut the kids in half."
The song "Motion Picture Soundtrack" ends the record, with the organ tones sounding like a funeral. Thom Yorke's voice is slurred and slow to the point that it sounds like he could possibly be singing from a coffin. Angelic harps cascade downwards. Majestic church choirs come from where you'd hear them from an out-of-body experience and Yorke assures "I'll see you in the next life." It's a song where you die. But that final, backwards tape-looped beauty that appears after you think the album is done, it reminds you there's still life to live, even if sometimes you may want to disappear completely.
Wonderful list man!! your # 1 is right on!!! great insights into all the 50 albums. thanks so much for such enjoyable posts.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading, man. I appreciate it.
ReplyDeleteNice list, well, mostly... where's Fleet Foxes?
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