Album Reviews: Web in Front’s 25 Best Albums of the Decade: 5 – 1

Well, this is our fifth and final installment of our favorite albums of the ’00s (the rest being here). As always, this list is entirely subjective–be sure to leave all rants and missives on the comments wall. Try not to fly into a rage if our number one does not line up with your number one–it will be ok.  And if you don’t own any of these records, remedy that immediately.

The entire list is broken up into five parts, which have run daily throughout the week, culminating with today’s 5 – 1 entrees. Oh, and our top 250 songs of the decade are here. 5 – 1 after the jump.

I know, I know–some fans will cry foul that the aesthete Led Zeppelin-isms of Elephant weren’t celebrated here instead, and, personally, my heart belongs to the underrated marimba weirdness of Get Behind Me Satan–but White Blood Cells stands not only as the first time in which Jack and Meg White delivered a truly cohesive statement of artistic intent (married to blistering set of rock ‘n roll and blues-pop), but also the definitive White Stripes sound.  Within this album is every sonic avenue and alleyway that they would pursue throughout the remainder of the decade–frenzied pop noise (”Fell in Love with a Girl”), the garage-shattering slink of Nuggets-by-way-of-Jimmy Page rawk (”Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”), acoustic oddities (”Hotel Yorba”) and sheer, shambolic strangeness (”This Protector”).  Moreover, the Stripes never again (at least in the ’00s) sounded as vital or alive as they do within this set, a thrashing collection of adrenalized and clever pop that immediately outgrew, out-did, and outlasted all of the band’s supposed ‘garage-revival’ peers.  There is a reason that the White Stripes are one of the decade’s most prominent American rock bands, and that reason begins here, in their Blood.

Listen to “Fell in Love with a Girl”

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Listen to “Dead Leaves and the Dirty Ground”

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How does one describe the indescribably beautiful?  According to any rock review of Iceland’s Sigur Rós, simply toss in the word ‘glacial,’ mix in few words about vocalist Jón Þór Birgisson’s voice, and voilà–you’re done.  However, no amount of words can do justice to the otherworldy majesty of Sigur Rós, nor their second album, Ágætis Byrjun.  An album of slowly-paced post-rock marked by bowed guitar lines and a permafrost beauty, and bound together with Birgisson’s haunting lunar coo, Byrjun sounds like the house band to a series of playful and childlike dreams–this is reverie music, meant to seep in over time as you lose yourself within its lush and surrealistic world.  And it’s a testament to the record’s power that, ten years, later, listeners still find themselves compelled to return to that world over and over again.  There may have been a handful of better albums in the ’00s, but nothing else sounded quite like this.

Listen to “Svefn-G-Englar”

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Listen to “Olsen Olsen”

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Perhaps it’s due in part to Beck’s faltering throughout much of the ’00s (Guero, The Information, about half of Modern Guilt), but Sea Change seems to have received a rather short shrift in the recent deluge of Best of the Decade lists, ususally popping up somewhere between the 50s and 30s.  Which is rather inexplicable, as Sea Change, a roiling and emotionally turbulent disc documenting the end of a nine-year romantic relationship, is not only (perhaps) Beck’s best and most honest work, but one of the decade’s as well.  Shedding the winking irony of Mellow Gold and Odelay, the playful troubador wistfulness of Mutations, and the funksweat genre splits of Midnite Vultures, Sea Change finds Beck raw and bare-boned, miserably sifting through the pieces of a relationship staggering to a bleak end (”And I wanted to be/ I wanted to be/ Your good friend” he moans on “It’s All in Your Mind,” the album’s broken heart) over a set of slowly unfurling and occasionaly orchestral folk-and country-rock.  Taking cues from everyone from Nick Drake (”Round the Bend”), Serge Gainsbourg (”Paper Tiger”), and Bob Dylan (everything else), Beck finally released a work of art that not only reflected his boundless–and boundary-crashing–interests in music and pop-culture, but reflected himself, as well.  If he’s never achieved this level of greatness since, well, few artists could be asked to spill their blood on the tracks more powerfully or beautifully than he did here.

Listen to “The Golden Age”

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Listen to “Lost Cause”

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Ten years later, it’s still generating heated debate–is it good?  Is it awful?  Is it rock?  Where are the guitars?  Radiohead’s Kid A was the first album in the decade to seem important in that dwindling way that fewer and fewer rock albums managed to capture throughout the ’00s, not so much capturing the zeitgeist as becoming it.  And while many missed the squalling guitars and Radiohead’s traditionally epic song structures, Kid A fearlessly asserted what a rock band at the height of its artistic powers and critical popularity could risk and accomplish.  Blending elements of Krautrock, electronica, free-jazz and dissonant classical music, Kid A indeed sounded like its titular character–the first child after a nuclear holocaust discovering and creating music for the first time.  Opening with the glitchy iceflows of “Everything in its Right Place,” diving into the cacophonic madness of “The National Anthem” and despair of “How to Disappear Completely,” and fracturing within the schizoid disco alarms of “Idioteque” before coming to rest in the elegiac etherea of “Motion Picture Soundtrack,” Radiohead cut and paste a myriad of sonic influences and inspirations into a new and brilliantly cohesive whole, one that threw down the musical gauntlet for the rest of the decade, while also soundtracking the dread, fear and cautious optimism which marked the ten years that followed.

Listen to “Everything in its Right Place”

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Listen to “The National Anthem”

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By now you’ve heard the legend–alt-country and pop band records difficult, experimental album, record label drops band, band goes on to release album anyway to thunderous acclaim and becomes one of the decade’s most revered rock bands–but none of that really matters just as long as you’ve heard Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.  The sound of a band evolving from pop craftsmen into something far, far greater, YHF is a cycle of heartbreakingly pretty, and pretty heartbreaking, songs meditating on communication and the failures to do so, with a majority of the tracks blurred and hidden beneath waves of static-choked noise and radio tags as the theme of obfuscation becomes the album’s primary sound as well.  Which is fine, heady stuff; however, none of that would matter, nor push YHF to the top of this list, were it not for the fact that it contained Wilco’s (and this decade’s) very best set of songs: the heart-crushing and drunken misery of “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” the bleakly radiant hope of “Radio Cure,” the soulful yearning of “Jesus, Etc.,” the brief, albeit lovely, bursts of nostalgia and love that locomotive through “Heavy Metal Drummer” and “I’m the Man Who Loves You,” and the quiet, shambling promises made in the aching closer, “Reservations.”  Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is nothing short of a work of art, one marbled with beauty, sadness, despair and hope, fighting its way through a turbulent sea awash in static, noise and confusion to a place of contentment and happiness, if only for a moment.  And if that doesn’t describe the journey of most listeners throughout the past ten years of their lives, I’m not sure anything does.

Listen to “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart”

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Listen to “Jesus, Etc.”

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December 11, 2009 | Filed Under Album Reviews, Best of the Decade, Exclusive Features 

Comments

One Response to “Album Reviews: Web in Front’s 25 Best Albums of the Decade: 5 – 1”

  1. Mouse on December 12th, 2009 11:01 am

    I sigh, loudly!




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