Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 60 to 51

Albums 60 to 51, AWW YEH:

60: Wavves - Wavves

What Nathan Williams typifies above all in recent years is the DIY ethic. Williams recorded all these songs himself using his computer, and with little concern for arrangements or production. Perhaps it's the sign of a golden age that the personal computer and internet connection has given to everyday folks, Vivian Girls are the pre-cursor to Wavves, the big sister of Williams the fuzz-drenched wunderkind. It's debatable whether it's pop music, but Wavves with two v's is the jewel shared amongst blogspotters and second-hand, European Pitchfork readers with a taste for American indie rock and dreadful ambient dregs. 'Vermin' is my favourite, because it sheds a melancholic light on Wavves' otherwise bumptious persona.


59: Ricardo Villalobos - Achso EP

European art wins out for me, it hits right at the heart. To generalise massively, perhaps Western-infected art, like much English 21st century music and film, and American similarly, is impeded upon by societal pains too easily. But then most European art of the 20th century is digesting the terrible experiment of Stalin's Communism, or the catastrophe of the Second World War. European wordless music has a chance to do something different, post-Classical. If Rudolph Arnheim claims that poetry fails after the holocaust then here Ricardo Villalobos in no way refers to such a thing, but proves minimal ambient music prevails. There is life positively spilling from these four tracks, and more than ever, kicks feel like heartbeats. 'Ichso' has a deeply pronounced beat that hits in a little before 5-minutes, and with the right sound system you'll never fail to be enlivened by it. Villalobos is a genius, his craft is a meticulous and endlessly rewarding one.


58: Gang Gang Dance - God's Money

Brooklyn is a goldmine. But Gang Gang Dance don't necessarily sound like they're straight out of New York City, more like the creature traumatised by a globalised community. This creature's pain is expressed in distinctly wonderful melodies, with bouts shrieking and delayed vocal loops. God's Money is the phrase a deceased friend of GGD's used to offer to receivers of his generosity, 'it's not my money, it's God's money,' he'd say. So God is at the heart of these songs, but it's up to fidgety critics to relay whether God is there or absent. For me, these songs are Holy things, 'Egowar' is a masterful expression of modern alternative music. If you're not cut-up when that strange xylophone-like loop comes in then, well.


57: Deerhunter - Fluorescent Grey EP

Deerhunter are the best guitar band of the decade, IMO. Cryptograms is the most innovative use of delay pedals, the antithesis of Bloc Party's twee. But an idea seems to surround the band that they're inaccessible. Well this 4-track monolithic slab of alternative guitar music solves that bollock-wrangle. 'Like New' is maybe about Deerhunter's deceased first bass player, Bradley Ira Harris, 'Be like new/be like you'. Or else it could be Bradford Cox shaking off the high school jinx, trying to be himself. Otherwise, 'Fluorescent Grey' is all about the city and the dying 'the city spotting/the corpses rotting/the glow'. The glow is the colour of dead flesh, as per the title of the EP. Above all that, these songs are invigorating to listen to.


56: The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow

I know this is nailed-on as favourite for real fans of the Shins, but it's heavier-going than Oh, Inverted World. Is it the last really good record by this band? You'd have to argue for a long time to disprove that to some. Me, too. Chutes Too Narrow is altogether a more saddened event for the band, a little Camera Obscura in part, 'Gone for Good' sounds like it helped to write Let's Get Out of This Country in one go. The intricate, lyrical imagery of Oh, Inverted World are apparent though, with grass growing in the corners of James Mercer's bedsheets.


55: Wolf Parade - Apologies to the Queen Mary

Remember this is a personal list, and I think for a lot of people this Wolf Parade record is a certain Top Ten. My favourite is 'Dinner Bells', it's Spencer Krug at his loneliest, 'There'll be no more dinner bells/dinner bells to ring'. I also love how it's 7-minutes plus, it fills a space of time perfectly, never feeling hurried or overlong. 'Shine a Light' was played to me by a friend and we must have listened to it about sixty times that night, it was a memorable introduction to the band. Perhaps Wolf Parade have finally taken a back seat for Krug though, with Sunset Rubdown now arguably making stronger records, Dragonslayer in particular.


54: Department of Eagles - The Cold Nose

This is a long way from Grizzly Bear's dusty classical dirge, and it's got to be Dan Rossen's sense of humour that makes the whole thing such a treat. '$20 lamp! $40 rug! Playstation 2! Tony Hawk 4!' as on 'Forty Dollar Rug', an ode to popular consumerism for the twenty-something males far-flown from the nest. The songs are surprisingly strong here, a first attempt for Dan Rossen as a musician, and our chum Fred Nicolaus also. You get the feeling that songs like 'Sailing by Night' and 'Ghost in Summer' clothes are the early indicators of Rossen's future fruit. Sure, In Ear Park is a very good record, but Rossen's magnum opus is yet to arrive. I can't wait!


53: Camera Obscura - Let's Get Out of This Country

Ouch, so Chutes Too Narrow helped Camera Obscura to write this record (material proof pending) but then it appears higher up! What a farce, someone email the media. Well, maybe 'Tears for Affairs' emotes like non-Brits cannot. Soz. That's flagrant racism. Nah, it's just different, Scotland is c-old. Or should I say, as only the Brits can! Look, 'Let's Get Out of This Country' besmirches all that, for these Scots want to live and love in cathedral cities like Munich and Prague: 'We'll wave goodbye to thankless jobs.../we'll find a cathedral city/you can be handsome and I'll be pretty'. Sounds good, ach aye.


52: The Knife - Silent Shout

This is where it gets heated. Silent Shout was Pitchfork's #1 record of 2006, but I'm sorry you don't put Joanna Newsom third behind TV on the Radio, and however much The Knife have crafted something like the best electronic record of the decade (for most people), well, you know, it's personal. Darkness and danceability are rarely married together, but then the Knife came along. Fever Ray is doing something like it currently, but it's less danceable and more minimal beat-intoxication. I listened to 'Silent Shout' on headphones in HMV in Liverpool, and I was scared. The headphones test thing was new, probably riddled by the bacteria of germy trance-face earholes, but the song blew that all away. 'Like a Pen', 'Marble House' and 'We Share Our Mother's Health' make me afraid of the sunlight.


51: Fleet Foxes - Fleet Foxes

Rob Pecknold, Tillman and co. are tapping into something divine. 'Meadowlarks' is distinctly gnostic-cum-early music, a song about a bird that I don't get to see in England. In fact, I saw a model of a meadowlark in the Horniman museum, and it's a creature worthy of the song. There is a sort of running, tree-hugging joke that follows Fleet Foxes around, and it's only because what is directly beautiful and wonderful gets scoffed at. Yeah, the Guardian are guilty of it, particularly in Michael Hann's review of Veckatimest recently, whatever they gave Fleet Foxes last year, 'landmark in American music' blah. On the BBC Culture Show, when Pecknold was asked by Lauren Laverne what his songwriting was about, he meekly replied that he wouldn't know how to write a song for a club night. Fair, Fleet Foxes isn't perfect, but Sun Giant is, nearly.

Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 70 to 61

Here's the Spotify playlist.

Albums 70 to 61, get in:

70: Azeda Booth - In Flesh Tones (2008)

Azeda Booth have gone largely unnoticed in the blogosphere, and there's not been a single mention of them in the British press. But that suits their sound. In Flesh Tones is a pale sounding record, with androgynous vocals bleating meekly amid swathes of swooning keys and trickling percussion of sticks and toms. For any fan of quietly ambitious ambient music this is a must-have. 'Ran' is the opening and standout track, the best unknown of 2008.


69: Belong - October Language (2006)

What Deerhunter do so well in parts on Cryptograms, Belong do for breakfast. Delay pedals are the least you can blame for this oceanic sound, where only the song titles do any talking. Take 'Who Told You This Room Exists?' and 'I Never Lose. Never Really', titles which suggest a standpoint, the posing of a question or a slither of rhetoric that capsizes into the stonking depths of these near hierophanous spaces of sound.


68: Dan Deacon - Bromst (2009)

Don't listen to this record if you've had any coffee, if you're particularly susceptible to palpitations or anxiety. I can imagine that listening to Dan Deacon's masterpiece in a busy inner-city might elevate you somewhere else, or will make you collapse. Deacon borders on genius, his songs are much like paintings, ecstatic works of art like something Miro did, but somehow all the more collected and congealed. Deacon is a patient artist whose live shows, apparently, are the best out there, whether you're a fan or not.


67: Feist - Let it Die (2004)

Leslie Feist is an integral part of Broken Social Scene, with her, the band aren't the full chomp. Just see Kevin Drew and co. cameoing in The Time Traveller's Wife (WTF?). I know. What she does well is humility, but more heartbreak. Actually, Feist has a pretty good crack at truth: 'The saddest part of a broken heart/isn't the ending/as much as the start.' I find that lyric to be positive in its reverse, you haven't lost anything by being alone. It's what you give to someone else, rather than what they can do for you. Perhaps.


66: Papercuts - Can't Go Back (2007)

I think Papercuts' most recent record, You Can Have What You Want, is pretty bloody good. It's not got the praise it deserves, but for a 4-star review in the English Times newspaper. You Can Have is an oneiric affair, all mooted loveloss and broken, droning organs, whereas Can't Go Back is a straight up folk megapiece. 'Sandy' is the love song for any summer, 'Outside Looking In' is a superb anthem for loners. Do not let this one slip by you.


65: Lindstrom - Where You Go to I Go too (2008)

Though album opener ‘Where You Go I Go Too’ runs close to 30-minutes, it feels more compact than much of Lindstrom’s last record It’s a Feedelity Affair. The Swede can be heard panting at the the title track's end, and for the listener it could have been the heavy breathing of a laboured-slog. Instead it’s the sumptuous rush of adrenaline that reaches its peak at around 27-minutes, an exhilarating surmount. The arrangements are impressive, and Lindstrom’s skill in this department is what makes the record a real joy.


64: Grouper - Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill (2008)

It’s near impossible to work out what Liz Harris is actually singing on the opening track of Dragging a Dead Deer Up a Hill, but the angst living within the harmony makes such knowledge unnecessary. ‘Disengaged’ opens with the sound of a world ending, the harbinger of some unspeakable sadness that will consume everything by the end of the song. And it kind of does, moving into 'Heavy Water/I'd Rather be Sleeping', with Harris singing 'this love is enormous it's eating me up'. To me, it's the issue of living and dying, investing or sleeping. For Harris she's lost beneath the waves, but the idea of being anywhere else is an unrequited desire.


63: Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - Lie Down in the Light (2008)

'If there's only one thing I can do/and you know that I don't want to do it' sings Will Oldham on 'Easy Does It', a paean to procrastination. The big pluses about this Bonnie 'Prince' Billy record are the production and its sense of momentum. The first few songs swan swiftly along and towards the album's close the momentum arrests in two lovely, plaintive numbers - 'Willow Trees Bend' and 'I'll Be Glad' - the latter offering hope to the Lord Himself: 'You'll always have me around'. Oldham's is a catalogue to be mined as if for jewels, let's hope he sticks around some more.


62: Department of Eagles - In Ear Park (2008)

Daniel Rossen's stench is all over Yellow House, Grizzly Bear's first official recording as a four-piece. And perhaps that stench is so strong that Rossen had to pull away, giving more space to the Grizzle Bizzle project and throw all his roughed-up, acoustic virtuoso-isms into something almost completely his own. Fred Nicolaus is Rossen's other half here, but the poor blighter has to work and wait while Rossen sojourns with his full-time band mates. But then so do fans of Department of Eagles, who waited a long time for this quite ominous record that shelves the sample-o-rama-cum-beatmania of DoE's dormroom offering The Cold Nose. 'Balmy Night' feels a little elliptical here at the record's end, but it's my favourite because Rossen's at his heartiest and most Chekhovian.


61: Vivian Girls - Vivian Girls (2008)

OK, I didn't get Vivian Girls for a long time. Vivian Girls' 20-minute run time seemed just to whizz-by, with the emotional content of the songs completely elusive. But after seeing the Brooklyn three-piece live and thus studying their material more closely, you realise that these are brilliant songs. There's an emotional intelligence to the way Cassie sings about lusting after others: 'I'm going insane/going out of my mind/does he know, does he know/that he's totally fine,' because she pulls-off the pop sensibility with aplomb. It's so quickfire. 'Tell the World' is a psychic romance that feels like the album's centre-piece, a signifier of the record's need to express the sheer excitement in loving someone else, and in being alive. Though 'I Believe in Nothing' proves that theory all wrong.