LIST: Mid-Decade Review: The 50 Best Albums of 2000-2004

I fully intended to present a mid-decade review nearer the end of this year at what I imagined to be the end of the beginning of the decade. Then I did the math and realized we're there! Plus I saw that Sylus and Pitchfork already had their halfway to 2010 spots up and thought gee, might as well. So I hemmed and hawed and thought good-n-hard on it and I came up with this here list: a Mid-Decade Review of The Best Albums released between January 1, 2000 and December 31, 2004. (The sticklers among you may notice some revisions of rankings from earlier lists - Best Albums of 2003, 2004. These have occured in full knowledge of the numeric discrepancies and with the full benefit of time and new entries...)

1. Radiohead "Kid A" 2000
2. Wilco "Yankee Hotel Foxtrot" 2002
3. Gillian Welch "Time (The Revelator)" 2001
4. The Flaming Lips "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots" 2002
5. Ryan Adams "Heartbreaker" 2000
6. Iron & Wine "Creek Drank the Cradle" 20027. Arcade Fire "Funeral" 2004
8. The Shins "Chutes Too Narrow" 2003
9. Secret Machines "Now Here is Nowhere" 2004
10. The Books "The Lemon of Pink" 2003
11. Queens of the Stone Age "Songs for the Deaf" 2002
12. Modest Mouse "The Moon & Antarctica" 2000
13. Liars "They Threw Us All In a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top" 2002
14. Jurassic 5 "Quality Control" 2000
15. The White Stripes "White Blood Cells" 2002
16. Bonnie 'Prince' Billy "Master and Everyone" 2003
17. God Speed, You Black Emperor! "Lift Your Skinny Fingers Like Antennas to Heaven" 2000
18. Spoon "Kill the Moonlight" 2002
19. Interpol "Turn on the Bright Lights" 2002
20. Franz Ferdinand "s/t" 2004
21. The Microphones "The Glow Pt. 2" 2001
22. A Frames "2" 2003
23. The Strokes "Is This It" 2001
24. Sufjan Stevens "Seven Swans" 2004
25. The New Pornographers "Electric Version" 2003
26. The Wrens "Meadowlands" 2003
27. My Morning Jacket "It Still Moves" 2003
28. Interpol "Antics" 2004
29. Jay Z "The Black Album" 2003
30. The Jayhawks "Rainy Day Music" 2003
31. The Black Keys "thickfreakness" 2003
32. Outkast "Speakerboxxx/The Love Below" 2003
33. Ryan Adams "Gold" 2001
34. Wilco "A Ghost Is Born" 2004
35. Sufjan Stevens "Greetings from Michigan" 2003
36. Loretta Lynn "Van Leer Rose" 2004
37. Loose Fur "s/t" 2003
38. Greg Davis "Curling Pond Woods" 2004
39. Super Furry Animals "Phantom Power" 2003
40. Iron & Wine "Our Endless Numbered Days" 2004
41. Damien Rice "O" 2003
42. The Postal Service "Give Up" 2003
43. Beck "Sea Change" 2002
44. Joe Henry "Scar" 2001
45. Modest Mouse "Good News for People Who Love Bad News" 2004
46. Norah Jones "Come Away With Me" 2002
47. Various Artists "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" soundtrack 2000
48. The Six Parts Seven "Things Shaped in Passing" 2002
49. Billy Bragg & Wilco "Mermaid Avenue Vol. II" 2000
50. Apples In Stereo "The Discovery of a World Inside the Moone" 2000

REVIEW: Damien Rice "O"

Rating: 8

Has anyone ever seen Damien Rice and Ryan Adams together?  Side by side in the same place at the same time?  I'd be curious to know.

Saying the two sound alike is the kind of understatement Rice specializes in.  At their best he and Adams are unparalleled craftsmen of the down-tempo and bittersweet.  However Adams' recent swerve into The Prolific opens a door for Rice and other urban provincials (I'm looking at you Bright Eyes) to cement their place near the top of a growing americana field.

Rice's wavering tenor cuts romantic folds from familiar cloth, draping listeners in his confidence and tying you to his point of view.  All in all this is a gorgeous piece of hushed singer-songwriting with dramatic nods to opera on "Eskimo" and tinges of jazz-lite throughout.  These flourishes as well as a consistently restrained use of violins (not fiddles) lend heartfelt ballads a polish few achieve without coming across as showy.  It was good enough to earn the young Irishman 2003's Shortlist Music Prize over everyone's darling in their big "Turn on the Bright Lights" release year and it's good enough for me.  I just hope future efforts show the same balance of candor and restraint as heard on "O" lest we end up with more drunken shouting and ubiquitous EP releases (I'm looking at you Ryan Adams).

A note: The Shortlist Music Prize may also be known by his full name, The MTV2 Shortlist Music Prize.  Shortlist understandably drops the MTV2 on most occasions in order to distance himself from his older brother's embarrassing obsession with Jessica Simpson.

More note: Not to give too much time to an artist besides the one being reviewed, but I give Ryan Adams a hard time, like so many others, because "Heartbreaker" was exactly, perfectly, beautifully that, and "Gold" very nearly lived up to its namesake as well.  I will try to have in patience what he clearly has in productivity.

REVIEW: Mars Volta "Frances the Mute"

Rating: 1

This just goes to show how naive I really am because I thought this kind of epic high-wire guitar masturbation had its last lethal overdose a long time ago.  Yet here it is at a Borders listening station near you, castrated sing/screaming and all.  And right next to Modest Mouse too.

No matter which super-indie you sit it next to or what kind of haircut you give it this is still not cool.  Maybe, maybe if you're a closet subscriber to Guitar magazine or a recovering Iron Maiden fan or just really fucking stoned, maybe then I can recommend you update your stacks to include this twenty-first century take on prog-metal with its operatic track structures and endless roller coaster guitar weenying, but frankly I'd only be enabling your regressive behavior.  No, what you need is a gentle Queens of the Stone Age let down followed by some serious Built To Spill therapy.  It's gonna be okay man, just put down the album and walk away.  Walk.  Away.

REVIEW: Beck "Guero"

Rating: 7

Let's review the major label life of Mr. Hansen (Beck, His Beckness):

Mellow Gold - faux slacker art folk funk with influences equally spread between Zappa and Fat Albert's junk yard band

Odelay - populist sample rock done well, public megaphone announcement of Beck the Rock Star's arrival

Mutations - down beat south of the border blues that seemingly came from left field after Odelay's upbeat success

Midnight Vultures - Beck flexes his libido and airs long hidden, strangely parallel Prince / Kraftwerk fixations

Sea Change - sad sack wrist-slitter supossedly brought on by a nasty break-up, but guess what - Beck can actually sing!

Guero - all of the above, prioritized as follows: Odelay aged in the barrel 9 years + Mutations minus the honky slide guitars + Mellow Gold cleaned of its grunge but still dusty below the knees + Midnight Vultures' swagger and some percussion but none of the backseat lip licking + Sea Change's voice and maturity without the numbingly beautiful depression.

***

Rumors of a new Beck "rock" album started to fly about two minutes after Sea Change cooled.  As if to confirm and reward his eager fans Beck launches "Guero" with a healthy John Bonham kick drum and throaty guitar riff on "E-Pro."  Track two is taco-truck funk, three a top pop tooth-ache, four ("Missing," my favorite) is a sweetly crooned samba tune, and by five we rock again but those apes from The Jungle Book swing in to play the drums.  It's Beck, so all bets are off really.

There's so much print on Beck these days it's hard to toss even a few more words onto the pile since I know they'll slide off.  Most of it isn't even about the album but about his non-stick surface.  The guy has successfully avoided genre pinning and personal exposure, opting instead for impressive but impersonal tags like "inventive, fearless" and even, gasp, "genius."  I put those words in quotes to make you think I found them someplace else but I didn't.

I'm sure someone (Beck's PR team) is relieved that there is finally a Beck album that isn't a manic divergence from previous work, perhaps ending the back and forth pendulum ride that has so frustrated fans and critics of one disc or another.  Or maybe Beck's genre dipping has generated a palette colorful enough to sustain itself for awhile.  I think that's the thing that hangs me up on this album.  Beck has proved himself to be primarily two things: an expert dumpster diver, processing pop culture highs and lows through his twitchy music-machine head to reveal shiny new facets still reminiscent of their source; and, when properly motivated, a writer of striking, universal, emotion-rich songs, and I don't just mean the sad ones.

Each previous effort, though a stylistic stranger to the others, made good use of these strengths while pushing Beck the Persona in one fairly clear direction or another.  "Guero" plays almost like a Beck on Beck with hints at several directions, each interesting but hardly sustained.  Optimistically it's Beck taking stock creatively and seeing that, in the memorable words of God, "It is Good."  Our friend the devil's advocate might call it "unfocused."  Anyone who knows me knows my glass is always at least half full.