I hear that Pitchfork is putting together a two-month review of the zero decade, where we will inevitably read about how great Arcade Fire and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah and Broken Social Scene and Fleet Foxes were all over again. So I thought it would be fun (and maddening…and impossible) to make a list of my favorite albums from the 2000s. I’d say that they are roughly in order, though it’s hard to really do a comparison test between some of these albums, which I love with all my limited ability and not in percentage terms. Also, I’m not saying they’re the best and certainly not the most important, just the ones I love the most.
Love to see yours…sure I’ve forgotten four or five of mine, as well. Look for a stream of apologetic updates starting right about ….now.
Dirtbombs, Ultraglide in Black
Oneida, Secret Wars
Kelley Stoltz, Antique Glow
David Kilgour, A Feather in the Engine
Devendra Banhart Rejoicing in the Hands
The National, Boxer
Mr. Airplane Man, C’mon DJ
Liars, They Threw Us All in a Trench and Put a Monument On Top
White Stripes, White Blood Cells
Queens of the Stone Age, R
Calexico, Feast of Wire
Wrens, Meadowlands
Jay Reatard, Blood Visions
Reigning Sound Too Much Guitar
Consonant Love & Affliction
Akron/Family, Set ‘Em Wild Set ‘Em Free
Bellrays Let It Blast
Mylab , Mylab
Vetiver, Vetiver
Espers The Weed Tree
Califone Roots & Crowns
Mission of Burma, The Obliterati
Calla Televise
Clinic, Internal Wrangler
Ponys, Laced with Romance
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25 comments:
No Pere Ubu? No James Yorkston?
i don't know how you do something like that!
did you hear that Gerards' house burnt to the ground last night?... gone... think of all that impossible to replace vinyl...
both he, Sally & the dogs are alright...
http://www.cantstopthebleeding.com/?p=18693
Simon, I always find that the best response to a really stupid, wrong-headed list is to write my own. :)
Michael, that's terrible. I don't know what to say, except even irreplaceable vinyl is just stuff and people (and dogs) are not. Not that that would make it any easier.
check this:
http://www.statesman.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/blotter/entries/2009/08/11/early_morning_fire_destroys_ho.html
That's really awful.
it must've been hell, being woken up at 3 am to that... EVERYTHING is gone... Sally told me this morning... i cannot imagine... i'm just glad they're both alright...
That's terrible about your friend's house, Michael. Glad that no-one was hurt.
me too... i love Gerards' realism;
“There are a lot of people who have a lot less than I do who deal with a lot worse, but this is pretty bad,”
& also his humor;
"This was a hell of a way to get out of hoovering the living room."
you can't keep a good man down...
did he have all his vinyl there?
makes you want to back up all your stuff on a hard drive and put it in a safety deposit box, doesn't it?
Well I haven't heard half the records on your list, so that's my listening for the next while sorted. Here's my go:
Baby Einstein - Baby Bach
Pere Ubu - Why I Hate Women
James Yorkston - Just Beyond The River
Pere Ubu - St. Arkansas
De Rosa - Prevention
Jesu - Conqueror
The Go! Team - Thunder, Lightning, Strike
Akron/Family and Angels Of Light - S/T
Alasdair Roberts - Spine
The Besnard Lakes - Volume 1
The Fall - Fall Heads Roll
Fuck Buttons - Street Horrsing
Dirty Projectors - Rise Above
Panda Bear - Person Pitch
Throbbing Gristle - Part Two : The Endless Not
Man or Astro-Man? - A Spectrum Of Infinite Scale
The Nightingales - Out Of True
Casiotone For The Painfully Alone - Etiquette
The Earlies - These Were The Earlies
Clap Your Hands Say Yeah - S/T
The French - Local Information
Tunng - Good Arrows
Good list, Simon.
I thought about Good Arrows and very nearly put The Real New Fall/Country on the Click onto mine. And I really love that Angels/Akron split, but I was trying to limit it to one per band.
I really like most of the records you've listed, though I've probably only heard about half of them.
Actually, I'm familiar with 13 of them, out of 22, and they're all good. (But I don't love them as much as mine.)
IMPOSSIBLE TASK
lol
i see a couple real good ones on your list maybe i'm just too damned mainstream and still dig hard rock n metal too much :)
Yeah, 22, that's 2 too many, isn't it? I almost included Clinc's Internal Wrangler and I thought about about Calla's Collisions. I'll have to give Telivise a listen if it's better.
Hey, Keith, I'm just going to guess and say that R and White Blood Cells is where we cross? But I never met anyone who'd heard Ultraglide and didn't like it.
And Simon, I didn't count mine...I'm betting that I didn't come up with a number that ends in 0 either. You should probably go up to 25 rather than down to 20 anyway.
No, I have 26, so long Ponys!
Man, these are impossible to do. But we're agreed on Oneida, Liars, QotS and the Wrens (those albums) plus The National and Clinic (although I'd say Alligator and Walking With Thee). I am going to have to do one of these soon, up to 50, and I am not looking forward to it.
Can't wait to see yours Ian. I almost put Burial on mine and then pulled back at the last second.
i guess i should have said "few" because i love that dirtbombs too.prolly listened on your recommendation.
you know me SO WELL :)
I worked on this for an hour till i got frustrated
Well, I believe we're doing a big Stylus one at some point soon, so I'm going to have to pound my head against the wall for a while... but I've only got year-end lists dating back to 2003! And I always miss some records each year! This is going to be a nightmare.
It's true that Burial's second record will probably be on it somewhere.
Keith, how could anyone love rock and roll as much as you do and not love the Dirtbombs?
As for the difficulty, it's really not. If you've got past year's lists that helps, but if not, sort your iPod by year and put down the ones you really love. Then move them around until they're more or less in order of preference, at least for this five minutes. The main problem for me is that there's some stuff from early in the decade that I never put on my iPod, hence no Pernice Brothers, no Macha, no Guided By Voices, etc. I may have to go through the racks before I finalize.
It's good to keep in mind that there is no single correct answer to all this, but they're all sort of right in their way.
Ah, but
1. I've still got 43 gigs free on my iPod, so it's safe to say there are plenty of gaps there too
2. We're going to be voting and assembling a master list, so my ballot may not be wrong but I do want to try and get a fairly well worked out/thoughtful one.
Ian, I totally understand wanting to get it right, especially in the very competitive environment of ex-Stylus writers. (Or is it starting again? Are you all current Stylus again now?) I can't worry about being right anymore. I just hope I'm still listening to music when the Best of the Teens rolls around.
Though re the not-all-my-favorites-are-in-iTunes issue: I keep thinking about loading all my physical CDs (at least the permanent collection, which needs to be gone through again) onto the external hard drive, but then my "playcount = 0" list would go to the ten thousands again, and I'm not sure I could face it. Plus, if you put everything in one place and drop it...yikes.
No Glenn Mercer?
No, still ex-... I'd love for Stylus to come back, but honestly I think Todd's approach - to both ending it and to potentially coming back - is similar to a band's. We stopped before we went shit, and he'd rather leave us in that state rather than get back together for a reunion tour that might tarnish the memory of what we were, you know?
All of which isn't how he'd put it, he's much less grandiose about Stylus than most of his writers are. But I tell you, I just got an edit back from him today for an RA review and it's the best edit I've seen of one of my pieces since... Stylus. Dude remains my favourite editor, and no doubt a big part of why RA is doing so well.
I've deliberately avoided getting an external hard drive, actually, for the same reason I want to live in an apartment and not a house - give me more space, and I'll accumulate more stuff. And I have too much stuff right now.
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