Top Albums of The Decade #11 & #12
The Sea and Cake – Oui (2000) / Jim O’Rourke – Insignificance (2001)
I owe my awareness of the Chicago post rock/indie/improv scene to a little known two-CD compilation I picked up for cheap back in London called Chicago 2018…It’s Gonna Change. During a time when I was still largely only listening to beats and rhymes, Chicago 2018 pretty much expanded my musical horizons so to speak. What followed was a compulsive acquisition of anything Thrill Jockey and ‘Chicago-associated’ which yielded a whole bunch of albums that I’m still not sure why I bought in the first place (anyone wants my Rob Mazurek CD?). Oh, and a Tortoise T-shirt.
The best ones out of that stack of now dusty plastic jewel cases are Oui and Insignificance. Oui is simply a pop record first, a jazz-tinged indie rock record second. I have always been a fan of Tortoise’s John McEntire who dons multiple roles in The Sea and Cake, primarily keeping tight pace as the drummer and being responsible for the sparkly clean production. The mood is bright, breezy and unabashedly pleasant, a sort of Pet Sounds on a more minimal scale.
Insignificance is in the same vein but rocks out a little bit more, a far cry from Jim O’Rourke’s less accessible experimental noise records. His songwriting is amusing and whimsical with a significant dose of cynicism, the kind of lyrics you’d use for an ambiguous Facebook status. From ‘Memory Lame’ – “These things I say, may seem kinda cruel / So here’s something from my heart to you / Looking at you, reminds me of looking at the sun / And how the blind are so damn lucky”.
I always imagine walking around London aimlessly when listening to these two records, which is what I used to do anyway. Wearing my Tortoise T-shirt of course.
Listen to ‘All The Photos’ and ‘Memory Lame’
Top Albums of The Decade #10
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Lift Yr. Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven! (2000)
This album is the be all and end all of post-rock. Nothing else sounded like it before it existed, and everything else sounded like it after its release. It’s a testament to the significance of the record and unfortunately also a reflection of how bland the genre has become. Lift Yr. Skinny Fists laid the groundwork for what would become hallmarks of post-rock – quiet passages of ambient noise with a smattering of melancholic guitar, increasingly swelling strings, grand trumpets, marching drums heralding the end of the world, guitars now generating walls of feedback, then everything comes together and builds up to the point of rapture and … all quiet again. It’s formulaic, but Godspeed did it first and did it the best.
Top Albums of The Decade #9
The Avalanches – Since I Left You (2000)
In my opinion the culture of sampling in modern music can be divided into three significant milestones. The Beastie Boys paved the way for endless multi-layered possibilities with Paul’s Boutique in 1989. Then DJ Shadow turned it into an introspective art form in 1996 with Endtroducing. Finally The Avalanches took it out of the domain of dusty basements and cluttered studios previously occupied almost exclusively by hip-hop and brought it to pop-level mass consumption. You could say Since I Left You is the precursor to all things mashup, making it cool for everyone else to mix hardcore rap with cheesy pop and glittery disco. The CD is sequenced into 18 tracks but there’s really no point in listening to this album if you can’t sit down and finish it in one go.
Listen to ‘Two Hearts In 3/4 Time’
Artist of The Decade – J Dilla
Photo by B+
When I think of early J Dilla I think of handclaps, a hi-hat in the back keeping time, hard-hitting bassdrums and most importantly an elaborate, slinky bassline, in most cases derived from a heavily muted vocal sample. A good example of this is the beat on A Tribe Called Quest’s ‘Get A Hold’ from 1996. It’s a rather basic formula for hip-hop beatmaking, but somehow Dilla’s method has always been different and undeniably unique. Dilla flips a sample like no other too. Michael Jackson’s ‘Human Nature’ has been used loads of times, but on this untitled beat he manages to recontextualize it in a manner that sounds simultaneously fresh and familiar, retaining the core melody of the original but taking on a whole new persona at the same time.
Hip-hop production is fundamentally a form of music creation rooted in recycling and reusing, generally taking more than it gives back. Dilla turned this concept completely on its head – instead of him sampling musicians (of the conventional type, i.e. one who plays instruments), musicians started sampling him. Questlove of The Roots who collaborated with D’Angelo on the latter’s Voodoo has spoken about how Dilla’s music was crucial in shaping the sound of the album. While they are consummate musicians in their own right, they were taking cues from Dilla’s style of irregular beat drops and indifference for quantizing, with some of the backing tracks essentially being Dilla beats recreated and rearranged with live instruments. All this inspiration from a man who basically lays his ideas down on a simple turntable, sampler and drum machine.
Voodoo, Common’s Like Water For Chocolate, Slum Village’s Fantastic Volume II and Dilla’s own solo joints Welcome 2 Detroit, the Ruff Draft EP and Donuts are among some of my favourite records from the past decade. All have Dilla’s overarching influence in them, directly or indirectly. These records collectively represent several significant phases of Dilla’s career. Voodoo, Like Water For Chocolate, Fantastic Volume II and Welcome 2 Detroit were all released in the early 2000′s and epitomized the more bottom-heavy, deeply soulful and laidback aspect of Dilla’s style. Common’s ‘The Light’ and Slum Village’s ‘Fall-N-Love’ are personal highlights from this period.
The Ruff Draft EP signalled a stylistic shift to a harder, edgier and more disjointed sound, less concerned with the mood but more with the bounce. I have to admit that when I first heard Ruff Draft I didn’t get with it immediately. I couldn’t identify with what he was doing on tracks like ‘Nothing Like This’ and hadn’t heard anything from him that I didn’t readily recognize. Ironically it took other people to sound like him before I went back and realised that Dilla was doing it before anyone else. I mentioned how he flipped samples like no other. Listen to this and this and see if you get what I mean.
Then of course there’s Donuts. The barebones, raw and spontaneous approach he utilized on here was unfortunately necessitated by the fact that he was working on the beats from a hospital bed. Given the circumstances surrounding the making of this album, it’s amazing to see the legacy that it has created in the years after its release. Simply put, Dilla showed an entire generation of new producers the value and art of getting more out of less. Three days after the release of Donuts, Dilla relented to TTP, a rare disorder of the blood-coagulation system.
Dilla left an immense discography, spread out over different record labels, bootlegs, unreleased material, beat tapes, forthcoming albums and an undetermined number of productions and remixes for other artists. Then there’s the insane amount of posthumous acclaim and adulation which may seem a bit puzzling to those not familiar with Dilla’s work. As an unabashed fanboy (although I’d like to state for the fact that I have been an ardent follower of his since his days in The Ummah), it’s good to know that there’s still so much more that hasn’t been heard from him. There’s no doubt that Dilla will continue to be on heavy rotation for a very long time.
Top Albums of The Decade #8
Aphex Twin – 26 Mixes For Cash (2003)
I’m really only including this as an excuse to have Aphex Twin on the list. Most of his landmark output was released back in the 20th century and technically 26 Mixes For Cash is no different, since a large portion of the songs on here were produced pre-2000′s. Aphex Twin’s trademark eccentricity and sarcasm begins with the very title of this compilation. Richard D. James, as his mum calls him, clearly has very little interest in the music industry but loves the work aspect of it nonetheless. The artists remixed here, as varied and diverse as they are running the gamut from David Bowie to Mike Flowers Pops, have nothing in common other than the fact that they were selected as source material for James’s outre studio machinations. Sometimes he remixes tracks he’s never even heard, as is the case with ‘The Beauty of Being Numb’ by Nine Inch Nails. Don’t ask me how that works. It’s just Aphex Twin being Aphex Twin.
Listen to ‘The Beauty Of Being Numb’
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.