Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 10 to 1

10. Stars of the Lid - The Tired Sounds of Stars of the Lid

Perhaps it's late 2008 with the streetlamps spilling orange light onto the bare branches; or the spring of 2009, with the clocks going forward, daffodils nodding in front gardens in the blue light of a chilly April-time dawn.

9. Joanna Newsom - The Milk-Eyed Mender

January 2007 definitely. Rain falling on grey paving, cracked slabs spurting black muck when stepped on. But then there's a harp and a harpsichord: 'I am blue, and unwell.'

8. Deerhunter - Microcastle

The clocks have gone back, it's early November. It's stuffy on the tube, the trains are empty but the floors are covered with wet footprints that glint in the glare of the halogen bulbs.

7. The Clientele - Strange Geometry

Ireland, June 2007, whirring along the lanes lit green on either side. 'Julia, I get on my knees!' Sitting on the flat rocks, looking out at the ocean that is unending, apparently beyond it lies America. The water is sparkling and sloshing: 'I can't seem to make you mine/through the long and lonely nights/but I tried so hard, darling.'

6. Animal Collective - Feels

Summer 2007, drunk and listening to Loch Raven, staring at an old Japanese painting of a bird on the mantlepiece. Or else it's lying in bed listening to Banshee Beat and having the quiet revelation come full-circle: 'I don't think that I like you anymore.'

5. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver

March 2007: Sunny weather. Someone Great's mourning work amidst the throbbing incandescence of Western Ireland's motorways.

4. Panda Bear - Person Pitch

'When my soul stops growing.' Sitting in a ferry cabin, the water green in the porthole window, the uneven gait you acquire the moment you try to stand up. 'Hey man, what's your problem?/Don't you know that I don't belong to you.' The feeling of beginning, eventually. Infinity.

3. Joanna Newsom - Ys

Driving to Scotland, the smell of methane coming from the fields, where cows and bulls sit in the aftermath of a long downpour.

2. Broken Social Scene - You Forgot It in People

March 2006: What a recommendation. I called you to make sure. Any excuse. Spring in Liverpool: broad blue skies, the red-brick university buildings basking in the golden light of the early afternoon.

1. Arcade Fire - Funeral

March 2005: Hearing Haiti upon descending into King's Cross tube station, like a song I'd heard before, so familiar. Like much of the good in life. August 2005: Seeing a friend's face when he emerged from the tent at Reading - euphoria, confusion, disbelief. September 2005: Leaving London in a car full of stuff. 'We let our hair grow long/and forget all we used to know'. I kissed her dancing to Power Out.

Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 80 to 71

Here's your Spotify playlist.

Songs 80 to 71, do it:

80: The Twilight Sad - Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters (2007)

One thing that really sticks about The Twilight Sad is singer James Graham's Scottish accent. It's so fitting for songs like 'Cold Days from the Birdhouse' and 'And She Would Darken the Memory'. It's also his employment of the c-word whence describing someone wasting away at his desk. The guitars are what make the record, with Graham's simmering hostility finding the perfect foil in the swathes of hammering guitars that push the band ever upward, the rolling, stuttering snare grounded beneath it all.


79: Pan American - White Bird Release (2009)

Labradford are a band, like Stars of the Lid, whose style you could describe as 'barely-there', or 'simmercore'. Mark Nelson is Pan American, formerly of Labradford. But Nelson's work as Pan American is more like Stars of the Lid, with more willingly ascending drones and the advent of husky, right-up-close vocals. Listening to this record is like wandering on the edges of sleep, it really feels like sleep-paralysis. Rather than the strange disturbance of being half awake and half asleep, it's fine to drift along these faint lines.


78: Madvillain - Madvillainy (2004)

I don't propose to know much about Hip Hop but I like Pete Rock, but he's more straight-up. The combination of Madlib and MF Doom came together in 2004 to make something of a comic book for the ears, or, if you're a bit high brow, a graphic novel for the cochlea. My favourite samples are in the intro track, where Doom introduces Madlib, and a little 1950s Reefer Madness-esque voice chirrups 'How do you do?' at irregular intervals. The record's sense of humour and thirst for texture is unrelenting.


77: Flying Lotus - Los Angeles (2008)

I can't work out Steven Ellison's beats. They suggest the anxiety and paranoia of an artist who works assiduously and on his own. 'Itchy' is the closest you'll get to defining it, but the real joy is in the ambient thrums and fledgling basslines. This is music that is very hard to write about and absolutely brilliant to listen to. You could almost say it was life-affirming. Beautiful, danceable and frightening all in one.


76: Pantha du Prince - This Bliss (2007)

It was the Pitchfork review that turned me onto Pantha du Prince, an introduction to the minimal techno field, one that led eventually to Ricardo Villalobos and on to Gas. The thing that hooks me about Pantha du Prince is a resemblance to nature vs. science, technology vs. trees. The medium is all computers, no doubt, but the spirit of the music is vast. 'Saturn Strobe' and 'Asha' make up the first two tracks, and I though they may have come from an overheating laptop in a dark room, the shakers on 'Saturn Strobe' sound like the empty, echoing streets of Berlin.


75: Tinariwen - Aman Imam (2007)

Water is Life is the translation, but it could easily be Music is Life (perhaps for a less poetic European House reincarnation). 'Mano Dayak' and 'Matadjem Yinmixan' are key to the album's melodic core, the chanting doesn't out-do Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan for toil, but the measure of the band's vision is bountiful. It feels almost post-rock in its sense of place, with the unmistakable African guitar sound that reinvigorated a turgid Western scene in the early 00s.


74: Broken Social Scene - Feel Good Lost (2004)

Some might describe Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning's work here as a poor man's Pan American or any other Kranky-imprint. But any record with Feist appearing on it is fine with me. It's nice to listen to songs like 'Alive in 85' or 'Guilty Cubicles', to inhale their wistful, almost teenage romanticism and realise the monstrous brilliance that was to arrive in 2002 when Drew and Canning built the BSS ark.


73: Dirty Projectors - Rise Above (2007)

I've never listened to Black Flag, but I know their songs are nothing like those that appear courtesy of Dave Longstreth on Rise Above. That's probably the point. 'Thirsty and Miserable' highlight Longstreth's compositional skill combined with the heavenly vocal harmonies of Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian. Some people really don't like Longstreth's voice, but it's a bit like Colin Meloy or Joanna Newsom - though very different - in theory it's a taste worth acquiring.


72: Arcade Fire - Neon Bible (2007)

I remember sitting in my university computer room and listening to 'Keep the Car Running' a few weeks before Neon Bible was released, my hopes were sky-high. I even remember a BBC Newsnight Review episode where the album was reviewed by a group of journos. A TV Chef tore into Win Butler for trying to lecture 'him' about climate change (?) and another novelist called it 'dull'. A Guardian journalist said it was 'scarily good'. It turned out to be a bit of both of the former descriptions. For my money (not much), 'Intervention' is a faux-anthem that underlines Butler's clunky lyricism which is found elsewhere on 'Black Wave/Bad Vibrations'. But not many bands can write songs like 'Keep the Car Running', and as much as it sounds, I actually really like this record.


71: Rufus Wainwright - Want Two (2005)

Rufus gets a bad deal from high-brow motherfuckers, and, if there's one thing Rufus ain't, it's a motherfucker. But that's beside the point. 'Memphis Skyline' is reputedly a song about Jeff Buckley, and it couldn't be more subtle - it neither confirms nor denies it - but Wainwright has admitted as much. The Canadian claims he was jealous of Buckley's successes in the early 90s when Wainwright was floundering in bars and pithy clubs. 'The Art Teacher' is a plaintive love song about a Turner painting and a lost, well, love. Ok, so Rufus's croon may not be for everyone, but, yikes, it works wonderfully for some of us.

Extract: On the Arcade Fire

Listened to Neon Bible last night, thinking, 'Oh, I haven't listened to Neon Bible in ages, I really want to.' But it was disappointing. The lyrics are terrible at times. Funeral, though, is irrepressible:

David Moore on Funeral:

Ours is a generation overwhelmed by frustration, unrest, dread, and tragedy. Fear is wholly pervasive in American society, but we manage nonetheless to build our defenses in subtle ways-- we scoff at arbitrary, color-coded "threat" levels; we receive our information from comedians and laugh at politicians. Upon the turn of the 21st century, we have come to know our isolation well. Our self-imposed solitude renders us politically and spiritually inert, but rather than take steps to heal our emotional and existential wounds, we have chosen to revel in them. We consume the affected martyrdom of our purported idols and spit it back in mocking defiance. We forget that "emo" was once derived from emotion, and that in our buying and selling of personal pain, or the cynical approximation of it, we feel nothing.

Even in its darkest moments, Funeral exudes an empowering positivity. Slow-burning ballad "Crown of Love" is an expression of lovesick guilt that perpetually crescendos until the track unexpectedly explodes into a dance section, still soaked in the melodrama of weeping strings; the song's psychological despair gives way to a purely physical catharsis. The anthemic momentum of "Rebellion (Lies)" counterbalances Butler's plaintive appeal for survival at death's door, and there is liberation in his admittance of life's inevitable transience. "In the Backseat" explores a common phenomenon-- a love of backseat window-gazing, inextricably linked to an intense fear of driving-- that ultimately suggests a conclusive optimism through ongoing self-examination. "I've been learning to drive my whole life," Chassagne sings, as the album's acoustic majesty finally recedes and relinquishes.

So long as we're unable or unwilling to fully recognize the healing aspect of embracing honest emotion in popular music, we will always approach the sincerity of an album like Funeral from a clinical distance. Still, that it's so easy to embrace this album's operatic proclamation of love and redemption speaks to the scope of The Arcade Fire's vision. It's taken perhaps too long for us to reach this point where an album is at last capable of completely and successfully restoring the tainted phrase "emotional" to its true origin. Dissecting how we got here now seems unimportant. It's simply comforting to know that we finally have arrived.

And Stephen M. Deusner on Neon Bible:

Like many indie artists, the Arcade Fire work best in the album format, and Neon Bible runs on a different-- and in some ways more finely tuned-- mechanical system than its predecessor. It's a shapely work, gracefully building to fall away to build again, as the band sustains a mood that's both ominous and exhilarating. Even "No Cars Go", which originally appeared on their self-titled debut EP, sounds more powerful here than it did in its previous incarnation. As stand-alone tracks, these songs don't make as much sense, which partly explains why those early leaks were so uninspiring. The danger here is inaccessibility: There's only one natural entry point to Neon Bible, and it's "Black Mirror". Everything afterwards flows seamlessly from that song's low rumble and startling imagery-- until the final track.

Venturing into the lyrical realm of Trent Reznor, album closer "My Body Is a Cage" seems too eager to wallow in the sort of pained melodrama that fuels the band's detractors. The real disappointment is that Neon Bible doesn't end with "No Cars Go", which easily achieves the release they artfully promise but playfully deny throughout the record's first nine tracks. Not only would it have ended the album on a more generous note, it would have made perfect thematic sense as a final invitation to escape.