Top Albums of The Decade #7
Broadway Project – Compassion (2001)
I’m still a bit miffed at the relative obscurity of this record. In a decade largely devoid of anything (good) from DJ Shadow and pre-Portishead’s Third, Compassion was my only fix for poignant, beat-heavy electronic music. The drums are hard, the snares are intentionally crisp to the point of distortion and the samples come from jazz, hazy psychedelic rock and liberal snatches of film dialogue. The choice of vocal snippets especially fill the album with a sense of despair and misery. ‘Non-Resistance’ for instance is underscored by a mournful piano and a woman imploring you to ‘help me / help my children / my men / my women’. Yeah, creepy. Not an all-occasions listening experience, but a rewarding one when you’re in the appropriate frame of mind.
Top Albums of The Decade #6
Boards Of Canada – Geogaddi (2002)
Boards Of Canada has fans, lots of them, and pretty obsessive ones at that. How obsessive? Take a look at Bocpages, a user-contributed wiki dedicated to collating and analysing every diminutive bit of information about the band. Song meanings, samples used, the number of biblical references, allusions to the golden ratio, back masked vocals. It’s insane.
BOC has this otherworldly persona about them that is only rivalled by Aphex Twin, beginning with their penchant for reclusiveness and aversion to interviews. An example is how the duo kept mum about the fact that they are actually brothers until a Pitchfork interview outed it in 2005. Of course, there’s the music itself which conjures up the images of faceless children in 70′s summer clothes, scratchy Werner Herzog film footage and rotating kaleidoscopic patterns.
There’s an ample amount of religious references and doomsday paranoia on Geogaddi, but only if you listen close enough (or if you are fixated enough to read about them on Bocpages). I spent years listening to ’1969′ not knowing what that synthesized noise that runs throughout the track was. Turns out that it’s actually a heavily processed voice of a woman going, “Although not a follower of hseroK divaD (David Koresh, in reverse), she’s a devoted Branch Davidian.”
Another track, ‘Dandelion’, has always been particularly endearing to me. It’s short, it’s repetitive and its sampling of Leslie Nielsen narrating about undersea volcanic explosions makes no apparent sense. But that’s exactly what makes it work. Boards Of Canada, intentionally or otherwise, leaves their music vague and open-ended. How you interpret it is left entirely to your own state of mind.
Listen to ‘Dandelion’ and ’1969′
Top Albums of The Decade #5
Low – Things We Lost In The Fire (2001)
The band’s called Low. The album’s called Things We Lost In The Fire. Their music is christened ‘slowcore’ by the music press. If what you have in mind is dark, cold and depressing, you’re just about half right. The pairing of Mimi Parker’s minimal, sparse drumming and Alan Sparhawk’s restrained guitar gives every song an ominous, eerie quality. While it’s all that and more, it’s also achingly beautiful and thoroughly captivating, especially when husband and wife team up on vocals on tracks like ‘Medicine Magazines’ and ‘Sunflower’. Things We Lost In The Fire can easily bring you to tears if you let it.
Listen to ‘Sunflower’ and ‘Medicine Magazines’
Top Albums of The Decade #4
Aaliyah – Aaliyah (2001)
While her mid-90′s pretty-girl R&B compatriots like Brandy and Monica fizzled out by the beginning of the decade, Aaliyah went from strength to strength until her untimely demise in 2001 at the age of 22. A large part of her success came from her symbiotic relationship with Timbaland and Missy Elliott. Symbiotic, because Aaliyah wouldn’t have had the impact she had on music without Timbaland’s then futuristic percussive stutters and self-sampling studio trickery, and Timbaland wouldn’t have had the platform to showcase his work without Aaliyah’s wide-reaching commercial appeal.
Aaliyah is a thoroughly enjoyable pop and dance record. She may not hit the annoyingly high registers of Beyonce or jerk her ass so hard it makes your TV fall off the table but she makes up for it by infusing a great deal of intimacy and closeness into her vocals. Aaliyah always sounds like she’s singing for herself first, then for you. And only you. Aaliyah, you’re sorely missed.
Top Albums of The Decade #3
Amon Tobin – Supermodified (2000)
Supermodified is an album that is simultaneously atmospheric and downright sinister. One moment you’re flying over green landscapes (‘Slowly’), the next moment you’re being chased down a dark, dank alley (‘Golfer vs Boxer’). And when you’ve survived that you’re back to flying over green landscapes (the aptly titled ‘Natureland’). Amon Tobin mostly incorporates samples from jazz and film soundtracks but what defines each track is his frenetic drum programming. He can either take it slow and easy or kick you in the eardrums at a cacophonous 170 beats per minute. All this and more while you wade through a dense sludge of plaintive guitars, industrial metal clangs and lounge pianos.
Top Albums of The Decade #2
Daft Punk – Discovery (2001)
The first four tracks of Discovery alone are worth the price of admission – ‘One More Time’ sets the stage, heavily auto-tuned and robotized for a generation of post-millennium disco freaks, with the energy level topping out on ‘Digital Love’ which is my personal pick for possibly the best single of the decade. Things sort of simmer down in the second half, bookmarked by the soft-porn instrumental piece ‘Nightvision’ and doesn’t quite peak again, not even in Daft Punk’s subsequent releases. Still, is this not the happiest record ever released regardless of whatever decade? From the get go Discovery is all about intense euphoria, unbridled joy and partying like we shouldn’t have made it past 1999 but are ecstatically grateful that we did.
Top Albums of The Decade #1
I’ve been working on this list for about two weeks now, and about a week before that deciding which records I should include in the first place. I’ve got about forty albums in an Excel sheet but am finding it a daunting task having to write about them all. So instead of trying to come up with one mega-post I’ve decided to split the list into bite-size chunks by posting a mini-essay on one album at a time. It’s going to be in random arbitrary order but hopefully that would impel me to continue writing instead of looking at the list in discouragement and going, “Aarggh is anyone even going to read this?!”
More than half of the list is made up of albums released in just the first two years of the past decade. Maybe those two years were really that great. Maybe it’s just a case of the albums having had more time than the rest to really sink in. Or perhaps it’s a combination of all that and being a guy in his early twenties discovering a ton of new music for the first time.
So anyway here’s the first one.