Lists: My Top 100 Albums of the 2000s - 40 to 31

Ok, I said too much last time:



40. The Knife - Deep Cuts




Deep Cuts trades more on wit and irony than any 'The First Cut is the Deepest' deal, with songs about proto-pornos as in 'Handy Man'. The record is likeable because it engages the humorous side of European clubbish techno that seems to be taken so seriously on the face of things by English-speaking ravers. It takes that homoeroticism and pushes it firmly in your ear. But it has to be 'Heartbeats' that makes this very fun album somewhat painful and heartfelt also.




39. LCD Soundsystem - LCD Soundsystem




It's a complete accident that I like this band. It was Reading in 2005, the Sunday night, alone in the Radio 1 tent. I'd gone initially to see The Futureheads but the schedule had been delayed. This was the first time I heard 'Yeah' (Crass version), a semi religio-disco moment that completely re-wrote my perception of James Murphy and co. The throbbing melody that gobbles 'Yeah' down re-affirms much of my ill-intentions that were probably well-meant in the first place. Sometimes you should just be quiet and have a little dance.





38. Animal Collective - Sung Tongs




This record is whack. Perhaps listening to 'Kids on Holiday' in an airport is a good idea, because the sense of giddiness translates, even if you are on your way back home. Sung Tongs is the infantile goodness of AC, with the rare hints of trauma that seem to guide this band, as on 'Leaf House': 'This house is sad/because he's gone'. That is the song that got me into them, everything else before just seemed, well, peculiar.





37. Broken Social Scene - Broken Social Scene




This is an underrated record. It's packed full of great melodies and the production is excellent. It's messier than You Forgot It in People, and it doesn't try to be anything other than what it really is - a melodic mess. But, again, any mess including Emily Haines and Feist will always manage to make the roughness pristine and lovely. '7/4 Shoreline' is one of the top songs in Canadian history, and, 'Swimmers'? Sheesh. 'Fire Eye'd Boy', 'Ibi Dreams of Pavement', 'Our Faces Split the Coast in Half'??? GET BORN!!!!1!1!!!1!!!





36. The Shins - Oh, Inverted World




Oh, Inverted World? It's a student's dream record, with songs about bus stops and bookshops. Yes, some of us are happy to get the bus and a little too happy to be in bookshops. Though, really it was Garden State that introduced me to The Shins. I did indeed wish that Natalie Portman had plopped headphones on my head, rather than Zach Braff's. Still, the first few listens to 'New Slang' offer a sensation that only this gullible and sweet-hearted kind of minor music can produce.





35. Alan Braxe & Friends - The Upper Cuts




Ok, so it's 2007 and I'm not embarrassed anymore, and no I don't want a fight. This is elated, euphoric French dance music that is completely welcoming and strangely indiscriminate. Though, you do have to stick with these songs to get their full spunk, like 'Most Wanted'. 'Intro' is Fred Falke at his best, slappin' de bass as only he can, in some studio in Marseille, probably. Let's not forget 'The Music Sounds Better with You', an infinitely playable track that seems to have soundtracked the late '90s as if by the soundbrush of God Herself.






34. Grizzly Bear - Veckatimest



Please let's not talk about Jay-Z or Twitter and all that Pitchfork news-barf about Ed Droste talking to some people who don't look like him or listen to the same songs. Veckatimest isn't a fashionable record but for 'Two Weeks' and Victoria Legrand gaining deserved notoriety in what is a stage of pre-Beach House breakthrough, before Teen Dream spaffs gently in the face of unknowing turbo-critics in January. What marks Grizzly Bear out is the slow thrust of fisticuffs as on Yellow House's 'On a Neck, on a Spit' and here with 'While You Wait For the Others'. It's also the New Weird America influences that sees the band wait for a song to hit, ala 'Dory' or 'Cheerleader'. Veckatimest is a very good record, but I'll admit, its charms aren't fully-fledged just yet. And that's a compliment.





33. Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights




For lists that matter this year - i.e. not this one - Turn on the Bright Lights is a three-four gob throb with The Strokes Is This It. It's not been a good past few years for Interpol. Ok, Antics was good, but Our Love to Admire lit few flames, and the band have admitted as much. It seems that everything comes back to their debut full-length, a seminal work. It's a good mixture of reverb-guitar-pain and danceability as on 'Say Hello to the Angels'. It's the bass that undercuts the mastery, with 'The New' written sorely but sweetly on my memory if ever I listen to it. And 'Leif Erikson' tears my tits swiftly off with Paul Banks talking about time that our deceased Leif once had for Paul, always.





32. Great Lake Swimmers - Great Lake Swimmers




My fellow Great Lake Swimmers chum made me a mix which included a song from an unknown GLS record. I called him immediately to say thanks, Tony Dekker's voice is one that puts me firmly back in the wet Christmas of 2005. When us Brits could use Pandora to discover new music (you can't stop the constant revolution) 'Three Days at Sea (Three Lost Years)' always seemed to show up and punch me in the shoulder. I couldn't find the record in shops, it wasn't on the band's myspace, couldn't find it free anywhere it was only available to buy online. And so, after months of shoulder-pangs, I got hold of it. And, though it's not a circus ride of varying styles, it sticks to exactly what it's good at: washing reverb-swamped vocals (pre-Panda Bear), and faintly disturbing lyrics: 'The man with no skin/they would not let him in/nobody wants to see a beating heart/a lung, or a brain/or anything'. All-American goodness ala Washington Irving.





31. The Tough Alliance - A New Chance




Pop music, not pop-ular, feels energetic and exciting, new and unfounded. So, not the same retreading of old economic successes/artistic fuck-offs. To listen to 'A New Chance' is a rapturous experience, 'a new romance' indeed. There's an intensely political feel to songs like 'First Class Riot': 'Don't you diet/first class riot.' And the wittiness of this Swedish (best) duo is what makes the politics feel un-political and more unifying, more honest. There is no discrimination here, it's kind of the pacifist's uproar, using a Zizekian but non-alienating sense of humour, the type to dig cynics in the bits. 'Neo Violence' and 'Miami' are both growers, giving A New Chance a sense of effervesence over time. But it's the style of 'Something Special' that lives on: 'You were something special/something real.'

Record Review: The Tough Alliance - The New School

via Ragged Words
Release Date: 20 Jul 2009
Record Label: Service
In Three Words: I Love Sweden
Ragged Rating: 4/5

By Daniel Greenwood

No one makes popular electronic music like they do in Sweden. It began with the Knife’s Deep Cuts back in 2004 (‘Heartbeats’ was song of the year for many, thanks in part to Jose Gonzalez’s cover version) and since then it’s been all Jens Lekman, Studio and The Tough Alliance, with ambient melancholics JJ recently becoming the new indie blogspot darlings. And that’s without even mentioning Air France or the Knife slice-off Fever Ray. You can’t help but feel that all the praise is well-deserved though, apart from the Knife, few of these artists have really been appreciated anywhere other than the handful of hegemonic leftist-indie websites. And that’s strange only because this is pop music to a beat, with the sunshine and witty sense of self reminiscent of the Beach Boys.

For the Tough Alliance, it’s a blend of English-as-second-language vocals, a well-reared sampling methodology, indigestible melodies that suck like leeches at your frontal lobes, and an imperious style of production as good as any cash-rich studio dope. These Swedes are bedroom musicians of the highest calibre. Among them, The Tough Alliance are lodged in the leftfield, and they don’t reveal much. In an interview with Pitchfork, the duo responded to a question about the nature of the band: ‘It is what it is, man… People seem to have an unhealthy need for simple, shallow, and irrelevant information and we feel it would oppose the essence of The Tough Alliance to encourage this destructive behaviour. We want the focus to be on the expression of the unity of TTA, not on our personas.’

If 2007’s A New Chance is a swift and perfectly-formed piece, The New School – the band’s debut originally released two year earlier - is something different. It’s five songs larger and twenty-minutes longer whilst being altogether more grounded. TTA have since built songs from the soil upward, but here the Swedes are compiling tunes brick by digital brick. And, for a while, The New School might not be what latter TTA fans had hoped for or expect if coming to for the first time. Whereas A New Chance grabs you by the ankle and flings you around the room, The New School requires a little more patience. At fifty-minutes it might be a too long for those expecting instant joys. Beyond the record’s underbelly of midget kicks and thudding CPU thrum-toms, there lies a contemplative edge. The sampling of the Kopite refrain ‘You’ll never walk alone,’ is probably an ode to TTA’s hometown football club (LOL), but for this bitter Evertonian reviewer it’s a concession to commitment.

The New School in itself sounds like a call to arms, with ‘Koka Kola Veins’ – the standout track here – musing on those in a sugary, cola stupor: “We got koka kola veins/we don’t know our names/blah blah blah”. It’s not necessarily a criticism but a confession. For TTA at least, it’s time to stop fucking around.