Top Fifty Albums of the Decade, Part One: 50-41

NOTE: As my jobs are picking up it's harder and harder finding time to write this as much as I'd like to. As result, I'm going to have to delay things yet again and release this album list in groups of ten as opposed to in groups of twenty-five. This will probably knock out the first Midweek Music Review of the New Year as well. Thanks for understanding and I apologize for the delay.

If I can state the obvious, music changes over the course of ten years. At the beginning of the '90s we had alternative rock, from Nirvana to the Smashing Pumpkins, and by the end of that decade it was boy bands that ruled the landscape. Coming into the aughts there was a very distinct separation between what was popular and what was underground, and there were equally distinct barriers between genres. When we saw a rock band do an electronica album we freaked, when we saw an emo singer and a glitch producer come together we cooed.

As the decade wore on and these kinds of collaborations became more and more common those genre barriers began to erode. We had Timbaland culling from Egyptian music on "Big Pimpin'", M.I.A. mashing up global genres into a cohesive pop-music whole, Afropop exploding onto the indie scene with Vampire Weekend, and Girl Talk combining, well, everything. Of course it wasn't always inclusion that made the best music, pop-rap, bar-rock, punk and indie all made their marks as well, but the sheer variety of sounds made this one of the most musically diverse decades of all time.

It was that diversity that marked Racecar Brown's top fifty albums of the decade.

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Number Fifty: The Thermals' The Body, The Blood, The Machine


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What's most impressive about the moderate success of their latest album's titular single "Now We Can See" is how nobody notices just how scathing a view on human history and human nature it is. Hard to believe people would sing along with a song that yells "Now we don't have to admit we were wrong," but the Thermals obscured their sarcastic vitriol with sugary sweet pop hooks, turning what could sound bitter into a gen-u-wine pop song.

But their tour de force was their 2006 release The Body, The Blood, The Machine, a record where their biting sense of humor was focused on religion and, while it contained just as many incessantly singable moments, it couldn't hide just how angry it was. Where Butch Harris' voice on "Now We Can See" was just chipper enough to hide the cynicism, that same delivery on The Body couldn't obfuscate the bitter cynicism. While cleaning things up lead to some mainstream success, it was when they couldn't help but be pissed off when the Thermals crafted a truly prolific piece of art.

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Number Forty-Nine: The Postal Service's Give Up


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It's one of the decade's great disappointments that the Postal Service never recorded a follow up to Give Up, and if Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello stay true to their word, it'll be a disappointment of the new decade when we're still without anything new from the duo. It's hard not to be disappointed. While Give Up wasn't what people were expecting after the triumph of their first collaboration, "(This Is) the Dream of Evan and Chan", it was still undeniable a success that people can't seem to get enough of. Hell, it's still played in the background of every whiteboard UPS commercial.

The mission statement of Give Up is clear from the opening lonely drone of "The District Sleeps Alone Tonight". While it wouldn't predict the variety of sounds the pair would explore over the length of the album it condensed the emotions into three notes that echoed the longing of "Nothing Better", the defeat of "This Place Is a Prison", even the romantic fantasy of "Clark Gable". "At least I spelled your name right" Gibbard sighs as the last words on the album, the yearning and resignation a brilliant summation of the album and the feelings of listeners waiting for a follow-up.

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Number Forty-Eight: The Very Best's Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit Are the Very Best


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Before Gucci Mane did it in 2009, Lil Wayne and Clipse were two of the biggest mixtape success stories in hip-hop, with the former's Dedication series and the latter's We Got It 4 Cheap volumes becoming as defining to their careers as their actual albums. In 2008 the Very Best proved that it wasn't just hip-hop that this could work in. They took the principles of mixtape making to a very different realm, Afropop, and through skillful production and, above all else, a monstrous singing voice, proved it could work there.

Songs like M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" or Vampire Weekends' "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" seemed perfectly formed already, but after hearing Esau Mwamwaya's vocals flying over these tracks subsequent listens seemed to miss his crystal clear tone and vibrant vocal harmonies. Even when culling from less obvious sources, like on "Salota" or "Dinosaur On the Ark" Mwamwaya's voice managed to heap added depth and passion to tracks that already had it in spades. When they close the album with Michael Jackson's "Will You Be There?" and take out MJ's weeping spoken outro and replace it with Mwamwaya's polite, genuine "We love you," it was clear that the feeling was reciprocated.

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Number Forty-Seven: Sigur Rós' Ágætis Byrjun


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Is it cheating to call Sigur Rós "glacial"? They come from Iceland which, while not covered in ice (I know that's Greenland), still was closer to the Arctic Circle than the Tropic of Cancer. They still had glaciers. And, sure, the towering, cavernous bowed guitars in "Svefn-g-englar" did sound like a ship scraping against the side of some mountainous ice monster and the rumbling crashes in "Starálfur" did sound a bit like an icebreaker crashing against the next frozen wave, but it feels too easy, like calling Best Coast "surf-y".

But there's simply no better term for Ágætis Byrjun, which moves like its icy brother so slowly and deliberately, sounding cold to the touch and exposing both a visual delicacy and an obvious, undeniable strength, like the slapped trio of organ drones in "Hjartað Hamast (Bamm Bamm Bamm)". Maybe it is cheating to call the band, to call Ágætis Byrjun in particular, glacial. But it's such an appropriate word that it's hard to avoid. It always felt like this record could sink the Titanic.

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Number Forty-Six: 50 Cent's Get Rich or Die Tryin'


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How many different songs can you quote off the top of your head from Get Rich or Die Tryin'? My guess is a lot. Just going down the track list recalls a multitude of memorable choruses. It's likely you remember the falsetto squeal of "What up gangsta?", the blasé statement of fact when Curtis Jackson admits "Many men wish death upon me" and "I'm high all the time", the undeniably sexy party anthems of "In Da Club" and "P.I.M.P.", the surprisingly romantic "21 Questions", the scathing "Wanksta".

It's that instant memorability that pushes Get Rich or Die Tryin' onto a higher level, but it's deeper cuts, like the violent "Patiently Waiting" where you can practically here 50's angry spit all over the studio's microphone or the whispered warning of "Don't Push Me" that's far more affecting than the gunshot that follows the titular line. It was the way 50 could weave between and even integrate pop rap and gangsta rap, something that hadn't been done in the aughts save for Chronic 2001, that pushed Get Rich from simply one or the other into something a little better than both.

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Number Forty-Five: The Mountain Goats' The Sunset Tree


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I first listened to John Darnielle's The Sunset Tree in 2006, during the most difficult year of my life. Forgive me for getting overly revelatory, but that year my grandfather and best friend both took their own lives, I lost my job and I was homeless for the last two months of the year, including my 21st birthday. So when that December, sleeping on a friend's couch, I heard the piano stomp of "This Year", where Darnielle cleverly declares "I am gonna make it through this year if it kills me", it immediately struck a deep chord within me. It was that sentiment that got me through the next few months until I was back on my feet, emotionally and financially.

Darnielle has always been a connective songwriter. Even impersonal tracks like "The Best Ever Death Metal Band In Denton" held a universal appeal in their lyrics when he sang "When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don't expect him to thank or forgive you," but it was when he started delving into his own life, particularly his history of abuse, on The Sunset Tree that his emotional pain spoke so clearly with the emotional pain of others. Musically more adventurous than his old single acoustic guitar home recordings and more beautiful for it, The Sunset Tree was the moment where Darnielle became a poet for the masses, where his verbose allegories could be held by anyone.

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Number Forty-Four: The White Stripes' White Blood Cells


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Most songs are about love. Be they about unrequited love, about relationships, about friendships, about sex, about longing, about missing someone, the most popular songwriting topic in the world is simple love. You'd think the world would be sick of it by now, but what artists have to say about love changes because what love means in our society changes as our society changes. If love hadn't changed since the Beatles, there'd probably be no more need to write about it - they just about covered the whole topic over the course of their careers.

But it did change, and there was no better collection of love songs than the White Stripes' third album White Blood Cells. They take a variety of looks at the genre, from the adolescent innocence of "We're Going to Be Friends" to blistering three-way drama of "Fell In Love With a Girl" to the breakup-and-crawl-back snarl of "I Can't Wait". And, sure, it might be the most common songwriting topic in the world, but Jack White brought an intelligent modern bent to the love song on White Blood Cells that predicted the White Stripes' continued success.

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Number Forty-Three: Phoenix's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix


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In a way Phoenix's breakout made the most sense in 2009. Their bouncy brand of indie pop that they formulated on 2006's It's Never Been Like This was gently influenced by the European dance music of their French homeland. As genre lines blurred and disappeared exponentially over the course of the decade Phoenix's multi-genre style now seems like it was preordained to explode this past year.

Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix combined playful rhythms with sentimental (Not sentimental, no! Romantic - not disgusting) melodies over the course of its ten tracks, sounding both nostalgic and forward looking, creating an interesting emotional ambiguity. Like despondency you can dance to, Phoenix pulled at both directions of the emotional spectrum, and pulled at several ends of a variety of genres to create something that counterintuitively brought listners together.

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Number Forty-Two: The Gaslight Anthem's The '59 Sound


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There are a lot of places around the world that have a sound specific to their region. Traditional Indian music, with almost double the amount of scale tones as Western music and their strange instruments, have an instantly recognizable sound. The same could be said of traditional African music, with its utterly unique vocal harmonies and tribal stomp. On a more local level, in the '90s East Coast and West Coast rap each had their own distinguishable styles, and surf-pop has long been the realm of California based bands. One of the less well-known regional sounds is that of New Jersey rock. Following in Bruce Springsteen's steps New Jersey bands like Titus Andronics, Ted Leo and, yes, the Gaslight Anthem, all have a distinctly Jersey sound to their music.

The '59 Sound, from the Gaslight Anthem, practically screams itself as a successor to the Boss. With big attitude, home-town stories, and furious guitar riffs you could practically feel the Turnpike under your tires with this blaring. But it wasn't just hero (or location) worship. It was filled with aching hooks and insistent choruses on songs that sounded like the band was barely holding themselves together. They sounded like Bruce and they sounded like New Jersey, but like the Boss before them, they made that state seem like everyone's home.

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Number Forty-One: Of Montreal's Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?


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The two things everyone wants to talk about regarding Kevin Barnes and the rest of his merry band Of Montreal are, firstly, the insane live show that seems to have a revolving cast of characters and strangeness while still blowing people away and, secondly, that Outback Steakhouse commercial where they changed the lyrics of their song so they were actually about steak. Actually, the two kind of go hand in hand. They're both reminders of how Barnes & company just kind of do whatever the fuck they want and don't care about the reaction.

Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? is a perfect example. Most bands would scoff at doing a disco/glam-rock breakup concept album where the main character turns into a 40-year old trans-gender African-American soul singer. Most listeners would scoff at it. But Of Montreal did it with no reservations - and succeeded. The success was due to just how the concept itself didn't overpower the music, but merely heightened the emotions, especially during the album's centerpiece "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal", which takes the characters self-hatred and channels it into the bizarre theatrical character detailed above. We all want to change into something completely different sometimes, Of Montreal showed us that even the most bizarre changes can be profound.

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Tomorrow: The Top Fifty Albums of the Decade, Part Two: 40-31