1. Deerhoof - The Runners Four (2005)
Deerhoof made a lot of good records during the last ten years, but this one is probably my favorite, and it's certainly the deepest. It's got ideas that grab you on first listen as well as some that surface only after many replays, and the more I listen to it the more I'm amazed at the way it sounds. Compared to their other records, it's crisp and lonely, like they recorded it in a walk-in freezer, and the mix is unusual (guitars panned stereo pretty hard, bass to one side, drums a bit low). But like the rest of the catalog it's brimming with ideas you've never heard before, arranged in a way that's often hard to predict but makes all kinds of sense once it unfurls. Raising melody + chords by a half-step for a quick bar in the middle of a phrase? Yes. Extending a phrase just a little beyond the point where you expect it to end? Check. In fact, phrases show up in all kinds of lengths that aren't integer multiples of 4---like the Dismemberment Plan and the Pixies and lots of bands I admire going back to the (late) Beatles, Deerhoof is just excellent at trimming the fat.
2. Converge - Jane Doe (2001)
Jane Doe has got to have one of the more aggressive album openings ever: five seconds of fuzzed-out tritones, ten of guitar stabs on the upbeats, then a quick atonal run into a wall of screaming guitars, screaming vocals, and near-blastbeat drums (watch the video in the last post!). There are metal bands who can do things faster or heavier, but Converge's mathy/punky/hardcore blend hits hard and fast and precisely in a way that straight-up death or doom or sludge metal doesn't. Fantastic stuff if you're into that sort of thing.
3. Matmos - The Civil War (2003)
Matmos put a version of "The Stars and Stripes Forever" on this record, and it's sort of a miniature version of the whole thing: a swirling, evolving stream of timbres that makes equal use of thumpy acoustic instruments, glitchy electronic noises, wheezing, choked filters, and unsteady field recordings. You've got choruses of slightly-detuned reeds, gentle rocking drum-machine kicks, marching-band bass drums, things that sound like prepared pianos. Autoharps or zithers or something, bright electric guitars, crazy shuffling slithery things that might be leaves or sandpaper or samples of fire. I'm making it sound like mere audio collage (writing in sentence fragments probably doesn't help), but there's really a purposeful, musical sequence of ideas here, at both the track and album levels.
4. Enon - Believo! (2000)
Some reviews of this record tout it as a) a bellwether for the indie rock of the '00s and b) the sort of thing that wasn't even possible until 2000. I'm tempted to agree with those, even though I can't think of any clear examples of Believo!'s influence on future albums, and even though I can think of a few similar records that showed up earlier (Cibo Matto's two LPs, 1996 and 1999; Self's Breakfast with Girls, 1999; maybe Portishead's self-titled, 1997). But those are late-'90s albums, and even if Enon's influence isn't directly visible, Believo! is nonetheless a prototype of '00s-rock features: a suitcase full of unconventional sounds and instruments; dalliances with dance genres (in this case, jungle and downtempo); synthesizers used for fatness, grit, and fuzz; digital modulation of vocals. Subsequent Enon albums refine these things, but part of what I like about Believo! is its unrefined bits. The production has this hazy feeling to it, and a lot of the tracks lurch along on a sludgy bass. Plus the songs are, with a just a couple exceptions, straight-up pop songs at their cores, and good ones at that; it's the noisy delivery that takes them from good to holy-crap-how-did-they-make-it-sound-like-that.
5. Animal Collective - Sung Tongs (2004)
This album is just about two albums in one. For the most part, the first half is melodic and (relatively) concise; the second is mainly long textural tracks that move sort of aimlessly through acoustic fog. But both halves share an aesthetic of computer-burnished organic sounds, like if Voltron had been made of wooden robots and lived in a cabin recording songs. The guitars and autoharps in particular sound brilliant and springy, and the digital effects gurgle and sparkle like a stream. And an occasional indulgence in odd meters and unusual song structures aims Sung Tongs right at my musical predilections. I've heard other Animal Collective records, but none of them are quite as exuberant as this one.
6. Fantômas - The Director's Cut (2001)
It's too bad that this record will probably appeal only to metal fans; it's so much more than a metal record. Metal is certainly one of the vocabularies that Fantômas deploys on The Director's Cut, but they make equally good use of choral hymns, Morricone twang, symphonic percussion, big band, and (speaking literally) various bells and whistles. It will probably come as no surprise to some listeners that half of Fantômas was also in Mr. Bungle. But while the latter band's genre-hopping seemed partly an end in itself, Fantômas's use of different vocabularies is more restrained, and always serves the songs---which on this record are all themes from horror or suspense films. If you ever wanted to hear the heaviest possible rendition of the theme from Rosemary's Baby, this is the place to find it. (Or, um, here.)
7. Radiohead - Amnesiac (2001)
For some people, Radiohead died after OK Computer. I disagree---I think they got far more interesting---but it's hard to single out one of the post-OK records as the best one. So having to make a forced choice, I'd go for Amnesiac. At this point Kid A feels too controlled and sappy, Hail to the Thief is uneven, and In Rainbows is like the chiclet of the Radiohead catalog: insipid pretty soon after the first taste. But Amnesiac has only grown on me, and it's enjoyable from beginning to end. (Even the stuttering "Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors", which struck me as a bunch of digital wankery at first.) And like Enon's Believo!, there's a hazy, dark feeling to the production that sounds amazing, especially with the synths (dig the bassoon-y thing in "Morning Bell/Amnesiac").
8. Godspeed You! Black Emperor - Yanqui U.X.O. (2002)
Some Godspeed records draw my ear directly to the Godspeed formula: build build build build build some more build BUILD BUILD ok come down for a while now build build etc. And then it's like watching a card trick when you know how it works---it can still be interesting, but it's hard not to think about the manipulation that's happening. Yanqui U.X.O. never does that. I'm always waiting impatiently for the triumphant dissonant guitar lead at the end of "Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls," with the screaming tremolo strings and the wah pedal sweep and the thumping, crashing drums. Every time.
9. Stereolab - Sound-Dust (2001)
From the Pitchfork review of the Stereolab EPs collection Oscillons from the Anti-Sun:
More space winds up occupied by newer material, much of it from after the point where some fans (this reviewer included) fret that Stereolab's output began to feel vaguely academic; something always seems to have gone amiss when a band that could float gorgeously on two chords starts throwing in pedal-steel interludes just to keep you interested.
To which I say: come now, rag on Margerine Eclipse if you want, but not Sound-Dust! (Pedal-steel interlude is at 1:36 on track 3.) There's no question that this record is late-period Stereolab, more cool/cerebral than fuzzy/urgent, but it's not as if it's merely an exercise in producing a record in the style of late-period Stereolab. The whole thing fits together more strongly than any of their other records; each idea within a song leads right to the next one, and the end of each song cues up the beginning of the next, like a perfect Stereolab mixtape.
10. Fugazi - The Argument (2001)
Fugazi spent the '90s putting out good and great records, and by the time they made this one they clearly knew their stuff. I can't think of another band that wrings so many different textures out of the standard guitar/bass/drums/vocals lineup, and on The Argument they put that versatility to work in service of pure craft. On occasion they help themselves to some extra things: a second drummer, a piano, whistling, maybe a Rhodes; but most of the time they're just getting sounds out of their normal equipment. Seriously, I'm not sure it's ever occurred to me to admire a straight-up rock band's skill at arrangement until I heard Fugazi. (If you've never listened to Fugazi, or maybe tried once but got turned off, this is the album to go to.)
11. Dillinger Escape Plan with Mike Patton - Irony is a Dead Scene EP (2002)
This gets the bonus #11 slot for being an EP rather than a full-length album. (If Dillinger's Calculating Infinity hadn't been released in 1999, it would certainly have made the top five.) Irony is a Dead Scene is in some ways a different animal from Calculating Infinity, most of those ways being the presence of Mike Patton, whose vocals add a variety of personalities to Dillinger's otherwise studious aesthetic. There's a bit of Patton's old Faith No More-style rap/barking, but there's also gasping, screaming, monkish chanting, whispering, and melodies both tonal and atonal. The band itself also makes more extensive use of synthesizers and samples, and in general the song structures are less verse-chorus-repeat than anything they've done before or since. In the same way that the 1998 Under the Running Board EP laid out the major elements of the DEP's vocabulary in less than 10 minutes, Irony is a Dead Scene set the tone for all subsequent Dillinger releases in just under 18. (Though I wish I could say that latter-day Dillinger's Patton-band pastiche is anywhere nearly as good as this EP.)
Honorable Mention:
- Mastodon - Leviathan (2004)
- Starlight Mints - Built on Squares (2003)
- Autolux - Future Perfect (2004)
- Mew - And the Glass-Handed Kites (2005)
- Tortoise - Standards (2001)
- Hot Snakes - Audit in Progress (2004)
- Queens of the Stone Age - Songs for the Deaf (2002)
- The Unicorns - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (2003)
- Aphex Twin - Drukqs (2001)
- Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? (2007)
- Tin Hat - The Sad Machinery of Spring (2007)
- Mylo - Destroy Rock & Roll (2004)
- Coalesce - Ox (2009)
1 comments:
Interesting, nearly all of your nominations are pre-2005.
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