I was originally trying to put together a list of my fifty favorite albums from the last decade. It seemed reasonable enough - we're talking about ten years of music after all, so it basically boiled down to my five favorite albums from each of the last ten years. Essentially. [Obviously something like the suck-fest of 2002 was going to have less and something like the amazing-ness of 2003 was going to have more...or so I thought.] So I started with a shortlist of about 75-80 albums and started weeding from there.
Once I got it down to fifty that I was happy with, it was time to start numbering. First place was obvious - and, honestly, had been decided from the second I first heard it - and the rest of the top 5 fell into place kind of nicely. Filling out a top twenty got a little tough - is this my sixteenth or seventeenth favorite album? Do I like it slightly more or slightly less than my fifteenth favorite? And so on and so forth - and then I just got tired of it and threw everything else into a pile. Also, as I was compiling I realized I had left out two albums that I couldn't say that I liked fifty other albums more than, but I also couldn't find two albums I liked slightly less to cut. So it turned into a top 52, which is an odd ball number and that made me sad.
So I did a little re-jigging of the list and came up with 33 1/3 albums - the 1/3 of an album being an EP- that I would like to round out the top 50-ish. The top 20 I came up with a pretty satisfying order, but after that it was an exercise in futility.
So for right now, I present the other 33 1/3 in order of release year - you can consider each of them my 21st favorite album of the past decade.
2000: The Bluetones - Science and Nature Primal Scream - XTRMNTR
2001: Ben Tramer - Halloween EP Björk - Vespertine Daft Punk - Discovery Destiny's Child - Survivor Sugababes - One Touch
2002: Imperial Teen - On JJ72 - I To Sky The Rogers Sisters - Purely Evil
2003: Elbow - Cast of Thousands Charlotte Hatherley - Grey Will Fade Junior Senior - D-d-don't Don't Stop The Beat
2004: PJ Harvey - Uh Huh Her The Rogers Sisters - Three Fingers Sonic Youth - Sonic Nurse
2005: Acid Casuals - Omni Duels - The Bright Lights & What I Should Have Learned Elbow - Leaders of the Free World Kaiser Chiefs - Employment Gruff Rhys - Yr Atal Genhedleath Super Furry Animals - Love Kraft
2006: Charlotte Hatherley - The Deep Blue Kasabian - Empire Robbie Williams - Rudebox
2007: Battles - Mirrored Bishop Allen - Bishop Allen & The Broken String
2008: Alphabeat - This Is Alphabeat The Breeders - Mountain Battles [album art of the decade for sure] The Kills - Midnight Boom These New Puritans - Beat Pyramid Van She - V
2009: The Boxer Rebellion - Union Pet Shop Boys - Yes
Here's the thing - there have been plenty of lists arguing a person's/group's/etc. favorite albums of the decade recently passed. [There's one coming here soon - of course - patience.] Far more interesting to me, however, are lists of albums that disappointed someone. It really brings out the snark - hooray! - and the creative way someone can write about something that failed to live up to expectations is far more interesting than something singing the praises of something else. [Pot, kettle, etc. I get it.]
So.
Ten albums that disappointed me over the past ten years. Apparently 2002 was a really, really bad year.
10: Radiohead - Kid A [2000]
Let's start with a big one, shall we? I simply don't understand how ten years removed people can still be singing the "praises" of this album. It wasn't the moment where Radiohead [and Thom Yorke in particular] turned from one of the modern eras most gifted artists into a group of whiny bitches - that would be 1998's insufferable and unwatchable "Meeting People Is Easy" documentary - but it was the musical manifestation of two years of trying way too hard to not make 'OK Computer II'. Fair play, but in the meantime they ignored almost everything that made them special in the first place and made an album of sub-Warp records cast offs, uninteresting sonic experiments and shat on one of their potentially greatest songs - "Motion Picture Soundtrack" - by, erm, soundtracking it with a dying organ and cheap choral synths.
Not that it's without its merits, of course. They did get "How To Disappear Completely" right and the electro-experiment worked in the fantastic "Idioteque" and the wonderfully paranoid "Everything In It's Right Place", but best of all was the bass-and-horn cacophony of "The National Anthem". Yes, I just listed off 2/5ths of the album, but the other 3/5ths is so horribly wretched, so terribly misguided, so just not good that it kills any good will that can be earned by those four tracks.
This is the sound of a band melting down, a band disappearing up their own collective ass, of a once mighty act falling. It's the kind of record that should have killed them, not furthered their reputation as the world's greatest band. It certainly was a game changer, that I can't argue - it made it impossible to take this band seriously anymore.
Say what you will, but 'Kid A' sucks.
09: Tori Amos - Scarlet's Walk [2002]
First there was the cheap- and rushed-sounding 'Venus: Orbiting' disc of 'To Venus And Back', but that was forgivable because it was hastily written & assembled and rush recorded on the back of a massive world tour to get out in time to pair it with a live album. Fair enough. Then there was the just plain awful 'Strange Little Girls' covers album but that was apparently a rush-job done to get out of her contract. Not really fair to fans, but fine. Do what you've gotta do.
Then comes this nonsense, a "proper" album with "proper" time spent on it, the album we were supposedly waiting for. Quite frankly, it was even worse than the two before it. More listenable than 'Strange Little Girls' perhaps, but at least that had the shock of being so awful going for it. 'Scarlet's Walk' suffers a far worse sin - it's boring. Dull dull dull.
Oh, and overlong. 'Boys For Pele' got away with being a third longer than it needed to be because it kept things interesting with the harpsichord and electronic piano experiments and mini-interludes that served as palette cleansers every once in a while. 'Scarlet's Walk' was one go-nowhere piano meandering after another, all married to a ludicrous concept about a hooker hitching across the US after 9/11. Or something like that.
It doesn't matter. If you need a good nap, put this one on.
[This one won out for the list over any other Tori Amos album in the last decade because it was the moment you had to admit she was really never coming back. I've always had more of a soft spot for 'The Beekeeper' than most, though it is pretty bad. 'American Doll Posse' could have been great with some editing and I still have no idea what to make of the nonsense that is 'Abnormally Attracted To Sin'. The less said about 'Midwinter's Graces' or whatever it was called the better.]
08: GusGus - Attention [2002]
This will be an easy one. GusGus was exactly what you thought a 4AD dance act would sound like - one foot firmly on the dance floor, another in the world of ethereal pop. My total adoration of 'Polydistortion' - and to a lesser extent 'This Is Normal' - is no secret. I wanted very much to like this album as well, but they made it very, very hard.
To be fair, it followed a complete overhaul of GusGus as an artistic collective. Now they were down to a slim four [or three, I forget] - the musical core was essentially the pre-GusGus house act T-World, fronted by new female vocalist Earth. [To be fair, former vocalist Daníel Ágúst did show up for a guest spot on "Desire" and it was just as bad.] In any case, on 'Attention' they went from something special to just another sub-par dance act in a landscape cluttered with them. Sad. They would never recover. Even sadder.
07: Sonic Youth - NYC ghosts + flowers [2000]
Let's be honest: Sonic Youth's recorded history is littered with some pretty bad ideas. That said, they generally saved their best ideas for the proper albums, so if you pretended that was the extent of their discography you were generally doing OK. Heading into 2000, though, they were in a rough spot. Their last album proper - 1998's 'A Thousand Leaves' - was a blatant attempt to re-capture 'Daydream Nation' that didn't quite work. [It wasn't bad but it certainly sits among their lesser albums at this point.] They followed that up with the well-intended but unlistenable mess of 'SYR4: Goodbye 20th Century'. They had also had a chunk of their gear stolen at a recent show and this was their first album recorded without it.
A chance to be reborn? Sure. As 21st century beat poets? Err...no thanks. The music plods, the lyrics are embarrassing even for Sonic Youth - "boys to to Jupiter/get more stupider/girls go to Mars/become rock stars"? Really? - and, well, the end result was terrible. They rebounded, truly reborn like a phoenix from the actual flames on 2002's 'Murray Street', but this will forever be a blot on a once pretty amazing album discography. [Joined at the end of the decade by the mess that was 'The Eternal'.]
06: Sigur Ros - ( ) [2002]
Where to even begin? Formless, repetitive, overly precious, trying-too-hard musical masturbation that got the "next big thing" hype so people accepted it. After the impossible beauty of 'Ágætis byrjun' this album was going to prove that album to be a fluke or to truly be an "alright start". Unfortunately - and, sadly, unsurprisingly - it proved the former, and the rest of the decade only drove that fact home. *sigh*
05: Suede - A New Morning [2002]
It's almost too easy. What were they even thinking? There is nothing - I repeat NOTHING - redeemable about this one. Even the cover art is horrendous. I can't even put it into words - the music speaks to the embarrassment itself. Nothing to see here.
04: Duran Duran - Red Carpet Massacre [2007]
What was promised was an 'Notorious' update - that's how I read it, anyways. What we got was the sound of the once "IT" band trying far too hard to once again become cool with the kids by hitching their wagon to the new "IT" producers. It could have worked alright - at the time, Justin Timberlake was essentially the Duran Duran of 2006/2007 - but for whatever reason it just didn't. They've bounced back from worse before, hopefully they've learned their lesson.
03: Pet Shop Boys - Release [2002]
Another one that could have worked alright - the Pet Shop Boys "acoustic" album, if you will, only not at all acoustic - but what we got was a cycle of incredibly weak lyrics paired with coma-inducing backing tracks. No one involved - not Neil Tennant, not Chris Lowe, not guest-guitarist Johnny Marr ['Behaviour II' this certainly is not] - was on top of their game on this one. Hell, not even at the bottom of their game - it's as if the Boys hired doppelgangers to fill in for an album while they went on holiday. Fortunately they came back in time to salvage the project with the shockingly excellent 'Disco 3' - probably the album we should have gotten in the first place - and we moved on like it was all just a bad dream.
02: Super Furry Animals - Dark Days / Light Years [2009]
Maybe it's because we're so close to the fact, but the mess that is SFA's 9th long player still stings. While there's no arguing that each album they released after 2001's 'Rings Around the World' offered increasingly diminishing returns, I never thought any of them were without their merits - 2005's 'Love Kraft' is particularly unfairly maligned - and was anxious awaiting this one.
Instead of another mini-pop masterpiece, though, we got a group of stoners releasing a string of inside jokes set to music. Great. A recent re-listen revealed what I initially thought to be true - the fantastic "Inaugural Trams" can sit comfortably alongside past glories as a fantastic SFA single, but nothing else here is worth saving. Not the 6-minute monster riff that ultimately goes nowhere of "Crazy Naked Girls", not the piss-poor "Mt.", not even the Cian led electro-fest closer "Pric" is up to any sort of high standard the band once held themselves to.
That it was continually praised as their finest record in years only made the whole thing more infuriating. A chink in the armor and hopefully nothing more, but for once I'm very apprehensive about what comes next.
01 - Björk - Volta [2007]
Fuck you, Björk. That's all I have to say about this, really.
A little behind the times - as usual - but the excellently-named Fear of Tigers have made his/their/whatever debut album "Cossus Snufsigalonica" [what he said] available for free download from his/their/whatever Facebook/MySpace/label/etc. You should grab it because - like his/their/whatever remix of The Sound of Arrows' "Into the Clouds" - it is fantastic and well worth your bandwidth.
Can't get any easier. You'll buy it when it comes out properly, right? Because that's the right thing to do. Good.
The early 90's dance revival is kicking into full swing and I think I like it. Imagine if he/they/whatever remixed a track off the new Alphabeat album? A-MAZING. Someone make it happen, especially if said track is "This Beat Is".
This year was a little tricky for a few reasons. One: while albums as a whole were a bit disappointing in 2009, plenty of individual tracks shone through and it was tough to not only pick the best to go together but also getting them to play nicely with each other. Two: formatting was a bitch this year with plenty of stuff being either digital- or vinyl-only so trying to find the best possible source for a track proved kind of tricky. And three: the effing loudness wars - seriously, it is getting a bit ridiculous. Check it:
Really? Shouldn't Trent and/or someone in Jane's Addiction know better? For shame.
Anyways, so getting it all to sound good when put in a row was tough and I'm sure it could be better, but there you go.
Anyways, get someone to keep us company:
01 Little Boots - New In Town single from the LP 'Hands' 02 V.V. Brown - Game Over single from the LP 'Travelling Like The Light' 03 La Roux - Tigerlily should've been single from the self-titled LP 04 Dragonette - Liar highlight from the LP 'Fixin To Thrill' 05 The Hidden Cameras - Mind, Matter and Waste from the "In The NA" EP and the only worthwhile thing to come out of the 'Origin: Orphan' debacle 06 The Sound of Arrows - Into the Clouds remix of Freemonster's single of 2009 07 The Temper Trap - Sweet Disposition single from the LP 'Conditions' 08 The Big Pink - Stop the World non-album single, though why it wasn't on the album is beyond me 09 The Breeders - Fate to Fatal EP title track 10 Charlotte Hatherley - White single from the LP 'New Worlds' 11 Jane's Addiction - Whores 2009 studio recording of a 20+ year old live only track 12 Kasabian - Where Did All The Love Go? single from the LP 'West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum' 13 Ash - Arcadia the "C" single from the A-Z singles project 14 Sugababes - Thank You For The Heartbreak essentially the Sugababes goodbye single 15 Pet Shop Boys - The way it used to be [Richard X Mix] remix from the "Did you see me coming?" 12" 16 Annie - Songs Remind Me Of You single from the finally released LP 'Don't Stop'
Here's the thing: 2009 was not a great year for music. It wasn't terrible, to be sure, but it wasn't as fantastic as it should have been. People who should know better were putting out terrible albums - SFA and the Hidden Cameras, I am looking very much in your direction - and even the good albums somehow weren't as good as they could've been/should've been/I'd have liked them to be. Or, perhaps, there was one album that shone so brightly it made everything else seem a bit dull. I like to think it was a mix of the two.
Yes, I'm whining, but isn't that what this type of thing is for? Anyways, putting together a list of 20 albums proved impossible - I had a solid list of 10 I had bought that I wished I hadn't for one reason or another - and rounding it off to a square ten also proved tricky. So I cheated a little - ten plus an honorable mention, which was technically a 2008 album anyways so it wasn't really cheating. Anyways, I'm babbling so here you go:
honorable mention: Annie - Don't Stop key tracks: "Songs Remind Me Of You", "My Love Is Better", "Don't Stop" Completed and put out in promo form in 2008 before parting ways with Island, 2009 finally saw a commercial release for Annie's second LP in a slightly different form. A few new songs were recorded and added, a few tracks - including killer single "I Know Ur Girlfriend Hates Me" - got relegated to bonus disc-land and we're left holding an album that is very much less than the sum of its parts. Almost every track here is great - I'm not a huge fan of "Marie Cherie" - but it feels like the final configuration of the album is not the best one. In any case, it is very nice to see this finally get a proper release and for every track save one - the cover of "2 of Hearts" which is fun but certainly non-essential - recorded for it to have been included in one way or another.
10: Charlotte Hatherley - New Worlds key tracks: "White", "Alexander", "New Worlds" The third Charlotte Hatherley album came to us in 2009 after numerous delays and lots of silence from its creator, suddenly appearing almost out of nowhere on release lists and - surprisingly - US download stores. Hooray! Except...maybe it was the delays, maybe it's the new note-perfect albums that proceeded it, but it's hard to deny that it's a little bit of a disappointment. There's an almost forceful obsession with colors in the lyrics - nearly every song mentions a color by name or the spectrum as a whole - which gets oddly distracting. Whatever the reason, it's the perfect case of a favorite artist's weaker work being better than most's best - not really a glowing recommendation, but it's what I've got.
09: Lady Sovereign - Jigsaw key tracks: "I've Got You Dancing", "Let's Be Mates", "Pennies" The video for "I've Got You Dancing" appeared somewhat out of nowhere in January and by April a totally unexpected second Sov LP was in our hands. I hate to use the word "mature" to describe an album, but she does show us a bit of her heart on the title track and her, ummm, bedroom/kitchen preferences in the completely bizarre "Food Play". Not as immediate as the first LP and there's no "Hoodie", but the biggest midget in the game still delivers when she could have very easily faded away into obscurity.
08: Jarvis Cocker - Further Complications key tracks: "Slush", "Further Complications", "I Never Said I Was Deep" Why did no one think to pair Jarvis and Steve Albini earlier? That's all we need to say. [OK, one more thing - THAT SLEEVE! Amazing.]
07: Little Boots - Hands key tracks: "New In Town", "Earthquake", "Stuck On Repeat" Is Victoria Hesketh the next chart pop star or the next Björk? I'm not even entirely sure she knows. What I do know, however, is that she's got what it takes to pull off whatever she decides her master plan is with the rock solid pop of her debut and an amazing stage presence. The charts / blogs / world are hers for the taking when she decides she wants them.
06: The Big Pink - A Brief History of Love key tracks: "Dominos", "Velvet", "Tonight" The sleeve really says it all, as 4AD sleeves tend to: a slightly fuzzy take on the new shoegaze/pop hybrid done right, a trip through 90's indie with 2009 glasses on. They could've easily fallen into the one amazing single/not so hot album trap - sadly, we say hello to the Temper Trap at this point - but it's all good and very nicely varied here. One thing, though: where the hell is "Stop The World"?
05: Kasabian - West Ryder Pauper Lunatic Asylum key tracks: "Fire", "Where Did All The Love Go?", "Vlad the Impaler" Yes, it is an absolute mess with the weird instrumentals in the middle of the album and Rosario Dawson spoken word tracks, but what a mess it is. Something akin to the soundtrack to a film that doesn't exist - or so its been described - the third Kasabian LP is as infuriating as it is enjoyable...and is all the better for it. [If you can, track down the promo instrumental album - well worth a listen and it actually enhances the album proper.]
04: Dragonette - Fixin to Thrill key tracks: "Liar", "Big Sunglasses", "Pick Up The Phone" This could very easily not exist, what with 'Galore' barely coming out in the end and all the chart and label bullshit the band went through a few years back. They pushed through it all, though, and the pop world is a better place for it as no one does dirty - in terms of synths and sex - pop better as far as I'm concerned.
03: Pet Shop Boys - Yes key tracks: "All over the world", "The way it used to be", "Pandemonium" Similar to the Jarvis Cocker/Steve Albini pairing, what took Pet Shop Boys so long to pair up with Xenomania? An absolutely lush sounding pop masterpiece, "Yes" flows wonderfully and has the perfect balance of BIG POP moments and understated down moments that the Boys do so well. Unfortunately the campaign was plagued with bad choices - "Love etc" is fantastic, obviously, but does not scream "comeback after a few years away" single which started the whole thing off on the slightly wrong foot - and the rumors were flying that the Boys spent a good chunk of time fighting with the label about things like single choices instead of, you know, promoting the album which led to their most commercial sounding album in ages turning into a relative flop. Which is, of course, very Pet Shop Boys.
02: The Boxer Rebellion - Union key tracks: "Flashing Red Light Means Go", "Move On", "Misplaced" Surprise of the year, here. Their debut album was passable if a bit unexciting, and then out of nowhere comes this. Totally self-funded and originally only digitally available, 'Union' is a widescreen, heart on your sleeve indie guitar record, the likes of which I thought weren't made anymore. Simply gorgeous.
01: La Roux - La Roux key tracks: the whole damn thing Duh. From the first hear of "In For The Kill" back in February-ish to the very quiet and somewhat pointless re-release of "Quicksand" a few weeks ago, La Roux totally owned my 2009. Say what you will about the album - Derivative? Absolutely. Shrieky? I guess. Dull? Never! - but from front to back the album is perfection.
It could have gone the opposite way. As fantastic as "In For The Kill" is - and it is really, really fucking fantastic - it screamed: "Possible One Trick Pony! Approach With Caution!" Follow up "Bulletproof" was the right second proper single in every way - similar enough to retain the fans you got the first time around but also different enough to show some versatility and an absolutely killer pop song to top it all off.
The album knows exactly where to go and when. The first side is single after single after should be single, hitting you constantly with synthpop perfection. The second side reveals a heart beating under all that machinery - "Cover My Eyes" is heart-wrenching, "Fascination" is the stalker side of you that you don't want to admit is there but you know is, "As If By Magic" is pure denial and "Armour Love" is the painful realization that maybe you were wrong. The only misstep - and it is a small one - is bonus track "Growing Pains" which is merely not as good as the 11 songs that come before it. [Why is it a bonus track anyways - I've yet to find an edition of the album that doesn't have it.]
Add to that the stunning artwork throughout the campaign and the ridiculous extra formats - shaped picture discs! one-sided etched 7"s! - to keep the collectors happy and you've got the whole package. Well played.
A friend and I have an e-mail conversation that has been going on for years that covers any number of pop music topics at any given time. Sometimes we'll dive deep into a given artist - it may or may not have started about tracking down promo-only Sugababes mixes, I can't recall - and sometimes it will touch many artists at a time.
In any case, Suede came up [again] recently and we were discussing their career showcase at the ICA back in 2003. For those who don't know, the short version is leading up to the release of the 'Singles' album, the band played five nights at the ICA in London with each night dedicated to one of their five albums. The first three nights they did 'Suede', 'Dog Man Star' and 'Coming Up' respectively from front to back for the main set plus an encore of period b-sides, fan favorites and new single "Attitude". For nights four and five, they did 'Head Music' and 'A New Morning' in their entirety but changed the running order for the gig. Despite having bootlegs of varying quality of the shows since they first appeared, I've never really given them a good listen. [The 'A New Morning' night in particular is of terrible quality...and it doesn't sound that great either.] Anyways, in the discussion it was suggested that listening to the albums in their "ICA configurations", if you will, paints an entirely different picture of the two oft-maligned albums.
First, I'll say that 'Head Music' is without a doubt my favorite Suede album - I know, I know. The idea intrigued me, though - I recall reading a review at the time how the band took the stage for "Hi-Fi" at the beginning of the 'Head Music' night all Kraftwerk-like and blew everyone's mind. So I was game.
First off, to play along at home you need the following playlist: "Hi-Fi" "Head Music" "Savoir Faire" "Can't Get Enough" "Asbestos" "Electricity" "Elephant Man" "Down" "He's Gone" "Indian Strings" "Everything Will Flow" "Crack In The Union Jack" "She's In Fashion"
Having given the album a listen this way twice, I would only make one change and that would be to flip-flop the positions of "Electricity" and "Elephant Man". Other than that, though, you get a very different picture of a misunderstood and - let's be honest - not fully realized album.
With "Hi-Fi" in the starting position, you get a very different idea of the album in your head from the get go. The first half becomes a very nasty electro-monster before roughing things up a bit with the endearingly goofy "Elephant Man" and then the now side-a ending thrill of "Electricity". [I don't care what anyone says, I still find the track fantastically exciting ten years on.] Side-b, on the other hand, is incredibly heavy and hopelessly gorgeous with a string of increasingly sad and lovely songs before ending with the ray of sunshine that is "She's In Fashion". It ends up sounding more like a bonus track than part of the album, much like "Honey" on 'New Amerykah Part 1', but somehow it works that way.
The exercise does serve to remind that an album can be more than the sum of its parts and that track order can make all the difference in the world. I do think it might even change your mind about the album if you weren't a fan to begin with.
Unfortunately, it also makes the last decade of Suede-related nonsense even more disappointing. *sigh*
I suppose I should give 'A New Morning' an "ICA" listen. Maybe it will change my mind...
These New Puritans have a new album coming out in January. It is entitled 'Hidden' and according to their official site, the track listing looks like this:
01 Time Xone 02 We Want War 03 Three Thousand 04 Hologram 05 Attack Music 06 Fire-Power 07 Orion 08 Canticle 09 Drum Courts - Where Corals Lie 10 White Chords 11 5
"We Want War" will be the first single, available on 10" vinyl on January 11th - although apparently it is already out as a 1-track digital download in the UK. The 10" will have an alternate version of the a-side as well as a solo piano version of "Hologram" and will come in a "luxury package with a surprise on the inside". Curious.
The video is out there. It is STUNNING:
Ho-ly shit. Amazing. Those drums! That orchestration! My immediate thought was what Bjork tried to do with parts of 'Volta' - think "Pneumonia" or "Vertebrae by Vertebrae" - but failed miserably at. They pass - oh yes - with flying colors. I totally loved 'Beat Pyramid' but this steps it up to a whole new level.
As is all the rage these days, the official site is offering an mp3 mega-mix sampler of the album in exchange for an e-mail address. It also sounds incredible.
