We're approaching the end of a decade, and it appears that the fashionable thing to do among those with an interest in music is to write about what we each perceive to be the best music of that decade. I'm somewhat cynical of the journalistic merits of endless list writing, but they provide a simple enough structure in which to place some opinions, and I'm lazy enough about writing as it is, so I think I'll allow myself a list every now and again. I also find it curious that lists like this are headed up as being "The best of..." when these things are clearly extremely subjective.
Anyway. That's enough preamble criticising the post I'm yet to make, so I'd best get stuck in. Here follows a run-down of my favourite albums of the past 10 years...
10 - Jay Z - The Black Album
I've only started listening to rap music in the past year or so, and Jay Z is pretty accessible as far as it goes. I find listening to rap music interesting, as the focus on words as opposed to music means that the style of "lyrics" is very different to the rock music that I usually listen to. With those genres you have to worry about the middle 8, the guitar solo... hell you have to worry about a tune. With rap you have a beat, and words... maybe a sample to go with it. The musical side is stripped down in favour of the words, so the vocabulary, the wordplay, the rhyme structure can be much more varied and inventive.
I also enjoy the different content in rap music. I've listened to a lot of rock and pop in my time - I've heard more than my fair share of love songs, for example. Rap tells different stories, and while they may be somewhat harsh to our white ears - bitches, niggaz, crack and Glocks - it is an alternative to the over familiar milieu of yet another mainstream guitar band. I even find the palpable hubris somewhat alluring - it's very different to hear someone like Jay Z rapping about being at the top of his game, the best in his field, in contrast to the overly modest shoegazing Britpop bands I grew up with.
The Black Album is not, I am told, Jay Z's finest work. The Blueprint is said to be a far better album, for example, and while I enjoy that too I'm just not drawn to it in the same way. Maybe it's that The Black Album is more in your face and more polished in it's production. And maybe it's just the fact that Dirt Off Your Shoulder and 99 Problems makes an almost unbeatable double A side.
9 - Semisonic - All About Chemistry
Ah, back in safe territory. Itunes pegs this as "power pop" and that's a fair assessment. Guitar, drums, keyboards... I know where I am with this. This album formed part of the soundtrack to a very happy time in my life, my last post-school summer before going to university. This choice is more about the memories of that time than it is anything to do with ground breaking music or particular lyrics, so maybe in that capacity it helps that here there is the familiar love and heartbreak that are such a big part of teenage years.
It is slightly bitter-sweet that an album I like so much was a commercial failure compared to it's predecessor. The band has been on hiatus for the 8 years since, and I'm not holding my breath for another album from them. Still, there's worse albums that you could go out on. This is thoroughly competent, well written and well produced pop. It also scores bonus points for high levels of innuendo, including an entire song about masturbation. And why not?
8 - Johnny Cash - The Man Comes Around
This was the last album released while Cash was alive. It consists largely of covers, though the title track is of note as an original recording documenting Christ's return in a calm, foreboding manner that I find both horrifically threatening and wonderfully comforting in light of my faith. The music here is stripped down and minimal, with some songs featuring just an acoustic guitar alongside Cash's distinctive voice. His voice is absolutely captivating, and there's a brilliant selection of tracks on here in all manner of styles.
The standout track is generally held to be the cover of Nine Inch Nails' Hurt, which serves as a tragically beautiful epitaph to Cash's life, and the place he found himself as he approached his death. I also like the cover of Sting's I Hung My Head, a ballad about a young man on trial for an unintended shooting, and Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus. Elsewhere, moving from the sublime to the ridiculous there's an old folk song, Sam Hall, with it's refrain of "Damn your eyes!" being hurled at everyone who stands in the way of the protagonist.
I often struggle to listen to just vocals and a guitar (you could throw a million talented "singer-songwriters" at me and I'll struggle to retain interest) but the variety of music here and the voice doing the singing are just too much to resist.
7 - Belle & Sebastian - The Life Pursuit
I was introduced to Belle & Sebastian by my then girlfriend and now wife, who had been introduced to them by an ex of hers. She gave me Belle & Sebastian, and I gave her the Eels, and we spent a considerable amount of time listening to their music as the soundtrack to our early years together. The Life Pursuit was released in 2005, by which time we were married, and - to employ a tenuous metaphor - their music has grown and matured as our relationship has, while also getting rather weird around the edges.
This is a diverse album, employing a lot of styles and with some fairly eccentric lyrics, and some very casual use of "the f word" that I can't help but smile at given the way the female backing vocalist echoes the line. It's also very "full" music, which I like - there's always a lot of different things to listen to on a track at any given time, like a slightly tidier Radiohead.
6 - The White Stripes - Elephant
If Belle & Sebastian's music is full but tidy, then The White Stripes' is full but incredibly messy. This is lo-fi grungy, and desperately under-produced, like they recorded it in a week on a tape recorder in someone's bathroom, but somehow it works. Meg might be one of the world's most bizarre drummers (and by bizarre, I mean inconsistent - not a great quality in a drummer) but she serves as an excellent muse to Jack, the creative mind here. I couldn't even begin to tell you what Jack is singing about, but he definitely means it whatever it is, and the music is performed with a fervour that you don't really find much of these days. This is imprecise, and all the more exciting for it.
5 - Muse - Origin Of Symmetry
Ah, Muse. A band on an inexorable trajectory into Matt Bellamy's pretentious little world. Their albums have been steadily getting more and more ridiculous, with their latest offering tipping right over the edge with a song that ends up being sung in French with a clarinet solo to finish. Hmmm.
However, look back to 2001 and you find the high point of the band's musical output. This album is frenetic, driven by it's distorted guitars and falsetto vocals, the best example of which being the unstoppable Plug In Baby with its ba-rock guitar riff. Elsewhere, a piano dominates Space Dementia, in the face of the onslaught of drums and bass, and on Hyper Music the bass takes its turn to push the verse along with a definite sense of urgency. There is an air of musical competence about the album, suggesting that someone behind the mic actually knows a bit about musical theory, which is good to hear once in a while. Yes, that does mean that there are hints of the musical silliness to come, but here they act as inventive tweaks to already solid songs rather than choking things into submission.
This is Muse at their best, and makes for a very welcome listen after attempting to enjoy the latter half of The Resistance. It was nice knowing you guys.
4 - Radiohead - Hail To The Thief
Hail To The Thief is Radiohead's last "conventional" studio album, before they got fed up and decided to release In Rainbows on the web for no fixed fee, and thereafter gave up on releasing any albums at all. Radiohead find themselves in a similar position to Quentin Tarantino who, having made his name and his millions on Pulp Fiction, can now do whatever he likes. After the unprecedented success of OK Computer, Radiohead are in a position to do anything, and the risk here is that they will. Mercifully things haven't got quite as silly as they have for Muse, but they've certainly got quite weird, and I rather fear they won't be able to come back from where they've taken themselves.
After OK Computer, Radiohead released Kid A and Amnesiac, which are both very inventive and exploratory albums, if not necessarily enjoyable in the conventional sense. The experimentation was, however, absolutely necessary in bringing Radiohead to a point at which they were free to produce an album on the scale of Hail. This album returns to the rock band roots of guitars and drums, but is not constrained in any way by any sense of the nature of the band or the music they make. The music bringis in any number of other instruments and recording techniques picked up in their more experimental phase. The music is altogether surrounding, almost oppressive and at times exhausting; the lyrics are every bit as weird as you'd expect and more; Thom's vocals are as ragged as ever, except when he's screaming or, on the last track, almost rapping. This is definitely Radiohead, but more so than ever before.
Looking back on this album, maybe it's not a wonder that Radiohead have decided to stop recording conventional albums. It must have been a veritable ordeal to put together something as big as this.
3 - Eels - Souljacker
As I said earlier, as my wife introduced me to Belle & Sebastian, so I introduced her to Eels. Eels are a pretty weird band, and in keeping with a couple of other choices on here, the music wanders all over the place, the production is minimal and the vocals are pretty rough. Souljacker is very varied in tone, with some very dark songs about persecution, violence and murder, all of which stand in contrast to Fresh Feeling, one of the most beautiful love songs I know of. The two even collide at times, with World Of Shit taking it's place as one of the weirdest love songs I know of - a marriage proposal as being the best option in the otherwise awful world we live in. Funny how things work out.
2 - Green Day - American Idiot
American Idiot was a very welcome comeback album, coming after Warning, an album I found to very disappointing. Green Day seemed to be drifting into much more mainstream pop-punk territory, to have lost their way. I can't really say that they had "sold out", without being lynched by the hardcore punks who'll claim that they sold out as soon as they signed to a record label that didn't operate out of a trailer and sold more than 37 records, but it wouldn't be too wide of the mark. I feared that they'd be making safe records from thereon, and had rather lost interest.
In the face of this, came American Idiot, a surprisingly grown up political punk album. My father has, in the past, complained that no one makes political music any more. Where is today's Dylan, for example? Well, if you can accept that he might be using an electric guitar these days, and have started swearing a fair bit, then here is your modern political rock album. The album has a strong undercurrent of dissatisfaction with all things middle America, not least the Bush administration and the war on terror, as evidenced on the masterful Holiday, and takes no prisoners in criticising the various things that have attracted the band's ire. The album was billed as a "rock opera", which could be enough to get you worrying about things getting pretentious again. It works though, as a cohesive album following it's protagonist on his journey, set against the middle American backdrop, through youth, religion, politics, leaving home, war, death, love... The album covers a bit of everything, in it's own crunchy, shouty way, and really cemented Green Day's position as one of the great rock bands of modern times.
As an aside, there should also be an honourable mention for Dean Gray's (alias Party Ben) re-working of this album, into the mash-up album American Edit. Heartily recommended if you like mash-ups. Which leads us to...
1 - Girl Talk - Feed The Animals
Ah, here we are. This is my one chance to feel somewhat self satisfied in the face of people who know much more about music than me, because I can be pretty sure that next to no-one will have even heard of Girl Talk. For those of you with a better memory of the 80s than me, I am not referring to the teen duo who made a minor incursion into the charts with the backing of Stock, Aitken and Waterman. Rather, I refer to the stage name of an American DJ who specialises in mash up albums. For the uninitiated, mash ups combine samples from two or more songs to produce something new. For the Radio 4 listeners among us, One Song To The Tune Of Another could be seen as a primitive precursor to this...
Feed The Animals is just under 54 minutes in length, and is made up of somewhere in the region of 350 distinct samples from music sourced from the past 50 years. The album is a single, seamless track. The length of samples used ranges from fractions of a second to a minute or so. From a purely technical point of view, I cannot help but be absolutely amazed at the craftmanship involved here, in putting together so many pieces into a coherent whole that rolls from start to finish in this way. The degree of invention here is incredible. Busta Rhymes and the Police? Sure. Kelly Clarkson and Nine Inch Nails? Why not. The Carpenters next door to Metallica? Better than you might expect. Salt n' Pepa's Push It, Deee-Lite's Groove Is In The Heart and Nirvana's Lithium all at once? Hell. Yes. The album is beautifully eclectic, by it's very nature, drawing on music from all over the place, and making for a constantly surprising listen.
If Itunes is to be believed, I have listened to this album over 30 times in the 6 weeks since I got it. I love this. I really, really love it. It's a masterpiece.
