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[  Honorables .. 100-91 .. 90-81 .. 80-71 .. 70-61 .. 60-51 .. 50-41 .. 40-31 .. 30-21 .. 20-11 .. 10-1  ]




THE STROKES: Is This It (2001): Of all the documents that emerged from the early New York City label sweepstakes, The Strokes' casually brilliant debut album, Is This It, has arguably retained the most staying power while others have fallen by the wayside, footnotes of an era that perceived The Velvet Underground as this generation’s Beatles. But what many forget is that good guitar-pop is good guitar-pop no matter when or how it's released, and this band of proto-hipster run-off has unexpectedly come to embody post-90s electronica fallout better than just about any other band from its era. Nearly every song on the album is an instant classic, and despite the ubiquity and unwanted influence of The Strokes’ sound, this quick blast of slacker VU attitude is nothing short of timeless. True, they're almost completely irrelevant now, but damn this was a great band. JC




ANTONY & the JOHNSONS: I Am a Bird Now (2005): In a music scene swelling with an ironic-indie-takes-all ethos, heartfelt sincerity and openness—the kind found on I Am a Bird Now—stands out. Powered by Antony Hegarty and his unearthly, beautiful voice, I Am a Bird Now was the windfall that gave Antony and the Johnsons buzz. Although the album is instrumentally spare, Hegarty’s piano, when combined with his vocals, packs a powerful emotional punch. Playing delicately behind him at the opening of “Hope There’s Someone,” the piano comes out of nowhere with a sustained one-minute swell like a force all its own. But it’s the lyrics—which read as personally as diary entries—that add poignant intimacy to every song. I Am a Bird Now explores, without restraint, the heartbreaking trials of life and love, and the very thin line that separates genders. Special appearances by Lou Reed, Rufus Wainwright, and Devendra Banhart are not the attention-grabbers you’d expect, but instead recede into the background, with the noted exception of “You Are My Sister,” in which Hegarty shares the limelight with Boy George for a very sweet duet. I Am a Bird Now is startling in its ability to embrace the duality of the fragile and powerful, both in songwriting and singing, with unequivocal grace. KS




THE DECEMBERISTS: Castaways and Cutouts (2002): “Take a long ride with me,” begs Colin Meloy on the last track of The Decemberists’ first record. See, I’d rather take a short one with the guy, hop on a motorbike with him and head down to Grace Cathedral Hill, or to Hyde St. Pier, where the city lights could blind our eyes. High on history and drunk on the drama of classic fiction, Meloy is one of the most distinctly literary of modern songwriters. He’s always been a better short-story writer than a novelist, his best work unfolding in fleeting anecdotes, perfect little snapshots of half-imagined places and half-remembered times. Lend an ear to the current, prog-obsessed incarnation of the Decemberists, belting out overblown rock operas at summer music festivals, and it might be hard to fathom how these merry miscreants ever got compared to Neutral Milk Hotel. But revisit the charms and quirks of Castaways and Cutouts, their first full-length, and it all comes flooding back: the simple arrangements that complement Meloy’s compact couplets, with lilting accordion adding punctuation to his most nostalgic sentiments; or the way Colin can pack a flurry of wordplay into a three-minute, jaunty pop song like “July, July,” then build a love sonnet out of spare and sparse poetic fragments, a la “Clementine.” The group’s affinity for nautical themes, their theatre troop playfulness, their reoccurring cadre of rouges and romantics, villains and vagabonds—it all began here, ten terrific tunes that we’ll remember till we’re old and ancient, though the specifics might be vague. AAD




KANYE WEST: Graduation (2007): Graduation finds Kanye West delving further into his day-glo metropolitan fantasy world. The escapism can be heard in the production’s glossy Euro-inspired synths, and further evidenced in West’s fashion choices of the time (not to mention the ostentatious artwork provided by Takashi Murakami). While the indulgent hip-hop lifestyle is well represented (on “The Good Life,” and, well, the majority of the record), uncertainty and self-doubt become underlying themes as well, prescient of the divisive exorcism that is 808s & Heartbreak. Kanye gains the confidence to converse with women only after several drinks (“Stronger”), admits to making poor choices and ignoring his mother’s advice (“Can’t Tell Me Nothing”), and emphasizes his obsessive fashion fetishism (a gesture that in itself might be indicative of insecurity from a not-so-wealthy childhood). Of course, the majority of the lyrics are concerned with self-aggrandizement and celebration of success, and West’s prosperity is certainly among the most deserved in modern hip-hop. As West began his storied career doing production work for others, discussing this record without mentioning the music itself wouldn’t do it justice. Graduation sees Kanye choosing more obscure samples (by mainstream hip-hop standards, at least), highlighting Daft Punk and Can alongside the requisite pitch-shifted funk and soul. As the website that coincided with the pre-album hype suggested (“Kanye Universe-city”), Graduation is a summative statement, the final work in a trilogy that includes 2004’s The College Drop-Out and 2005’s great Late Registration. His career continues to be mired by very public controversies, but there’s no doubt that West is one of the decade’s most influential musicians and entertainers. LS




KEITH FULLERTON WHITMAN: Playthroughs (2002): Musicians were dabbling in ambient music for a quarter century or more before the year 2002. However, it was that year in particular which brought a nascent scene of incidental artists to a much wider audience, helped in no small part by Keith Fullerton Whitman, perhaps the preeminent modern ambient producer and purveyor of all things suggestive and transporting. His most crystalline work, Playthroughs, consists of little more than the hum of processed guitar and flecks of feedback, but it's unquestionably one of the most emotionally affecting musical documents ever filtered through a hard drive. We’re currently experiencing yet another renaissance for ambient music and the genre’s best run of records since 2002; it should be noted that all these promising musicians—from Brock Van Wey to Mountains to White Rainbow to Emeralds—can still be (and should be) traced back to Playthroughs and its delicate canvas of shimmering drones and sublime frequencies. Completely of a piece and with enough subtly striking detail to render its title a necessity, Playthroughs set a bar very few musicians will likely ever reach. JC




DESTROYER: Destroyer’s Rubies (2006): Dan Bejar has made a career of releasing divisive albums, and so far only 2006's Destroyer's Rubies seems to have found consensus. And for good reason: that impossibly dense (some might say pretentious) wordplay that so defines Destroyer opened itself up to even more universal themes, which in turn seemed to inspire a new level of emotion. Bejar's melodies snake and slither through the record’s labyrinthine grooves as if by subconscious inspiration. But most importantly, Destroyer's Rubies is consistent to a tee (no small feat for a mind as restless as Bejar’s), an ever-building piece of intrinsically linked melodies, themes and slightly risqué desires. It's without question the best Destroyer album of the Aughts, and one of the only records that Bejar has yet produced that can match his seminal sophomore statement, City of Daughters. JC




THE KNIFE: Silent Shout (2006): The two Dreijer siblings that make up The Knife are infamous for their media avoidance; up until 2006, the group never performed live despite releasing three critically-acclaimed albums. This didn't stop the duo from receiving countless awards, most notably for their 2006 album, Silent Shout. Winning a landmark six awards at the “Grammis” (Sweden’s Grammys), including Album of the Year, Silent Shout is nothing short of a dark, twisted masterwork. Both extremely challenging and engaging, the album is a potent maelstrom of electronic pulses, heavily distorted vocals, and immaculate production. Lead singer Karin Dreijer-Andersson’s eccentric lyrics combine with brother Olof’s icy productions to create the perfect formula for a uniquely intense sonic experience (a 180 from the colorful pop soundscapes of 2003’s Deep Cuts). Right at the outset the Knife present us with their darker, more ambitious sound with the title track, a move that progresses across eleven sinister compositions that detail topics like addiction and physical disorder. At times, the duo briefly abandon the dark, beleaguered beats in favor of quirky cuts like single, “We Share Our Mother’s Health,” and the sexy, otherworldly cabaret of “Marble House.” While the album isn't straightforward (nothing about the Knife is), Silent Shout rewards patience. MK




DEVENDRA BANHART: Rejoicing in the Hands (2004): Few albums have appeared so rooted in the past while looking so progressively forward as Devendra Banhart's superb sophomore effort, Rejoicing in the Hands. It’s a record that sounds both age-old and completely modern, a strange and stimulating blend of musical roots and new ideas that nobody had brought together in quite this way before, or has since. Banhart is sometimes associated with the “freak-folk” genre that peaked midway through this decade, and that’s a fair enough correlation, I suppose. But it says nothing about what we experience when listening to the ambitiously eclectic Rejoicing, a folk album of exceptionally high quality, and a genuinely influential one as well. Banhart is an eccentric lyricist and his warbling voice imparts an almost otherworldly effect at times, but his music is rooted in traditional and familiar elements, and it's presented in a fairly modest way. His peculiarities aren’t a gimmick or a cry for attention—they’re extensions of the man himself and they help make Rejoicing compelling; they never feel less than completely natural. Right from the beginning, the record’s appeal is manifest in “This is the Way” and “A Sight to Behold,” two perfect examples of the gentle, warm and melodic musical personality contained within. The album its twists and turns but never alienates or aggravates the listener. It’s a weird and sometimes wild ride, but a gorgeous and sublime one as well. CN




SPOON: Kill the Moonlight (2001): Though they were still intrinsically linked with the late 90s indie-rock scene by the time the decade turned (see their 1998 classic A Series of Sneaks), Spoon defiantly began playing Jenga with their already sparse sound with 2001’s underrated Girls Can Tell—a move which coincided nicely with the impending rock-band malaise brought on in the wake of the new millennium. By the time of 2002’s Kill the Moonlight, however, there was almost nothing left for the band to put to tape. Yes, they would go on to release a little album called Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga in the years proceeding, but it was Kill the Moonlight that more ably attempted to break rock music down to its most basic vocabulary. Certainly Young Marble Giants and their 1980 masterpiece Colossal Youth are the most obvious template from which the band are drawing, but Kill the Moonlight's twelve primitive tracks still feel totally foreign in any sort of modern rock-based context. Master technician Jim Eno's studio experimentation was already pulling like silly putty at the established Spoon sound, and from a production standpoint alone Kill the Moonlight may be the most the flat-out interesting record of the entire decade. Lucky for us, the songs live up to this concentrated aesthetic conceit, with tracks such as “The Way We Get By” and “Jonathan Fisk” having long since entered the indie-rock lexicon without folding to outside concerns (a problem which has intermittently hampered their recent output). Time will tell, of course, but there’s a good chance Spoon never tops this one. JC




THE NATIONAL: Alligator (2005): Alligator is an album that seemed to be both a natural evolution and a giant leap forward from the record that preceded it, Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. The National had obviously taken the time to refine and enhance their sound, and Alligator has a more focused, purposeful feel, while the songs themselves are somehow a great deal more emotive and stirring than anything the band had done before—which is high praise indeed. Much of this progress can be attributed to frontman Matt Berninger, who elevated his songwriting to a new level. Delivered with his powerful baritone, his lyricism isn’t especially literary or wordy; he’s just able to convey more emotion or meaning in one phrase than most artists can squeeze out of an entire song, and Alligator is full of examples of this gift. Of course, credit is more than due to his bandmates, who add potency to Berninger’s lyrics with detailed textures comprised primarily of guitar, bass, and percussion. Whether providing the backdrop for the melancholy balladry of “Daughters of the Soho Riots,” or a fiery rocker like “Mr. November,” the band ensures that every insistent riff or bit of drumming brings the emotion of the song to life. Over the course of thirteen tracks, Alligator evidences time and time again that the National fulfilled and surpassed the promise shown on earlier records to make a most exceptional and unique rock album. CN




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