While I certainly hope I can follow through on my desire to put up a music post every Friday, it is not exactly the plan to post nothing but music posts on Friday. But here are two in a row. And two lists in a row, to boot! This one at least will be worthy of the name....
I should have posted this last year, at the beginning of the new decade - but things happened last year, and I put it off, and I haven't been listening to music as much this year, or thinking about it, and suddenly here we are, in 2011, and I've done nothing to come to grips with the music of the past decade and so... We'll try it now. I could pretend to make a virtue of it - giving myself another year to think things over, catch up - but it hasn't worked that way. I alluded to my listening cycles last week - I am in a very definite down cycle now... That's a bit inconvenient when it comes to trying to assess the 2000s (or what I thought of the 2000s), because for most of that decade, I was in a most definite up cycle. I bought an awful lot of records in the 00s, and listened to them, songs and records alike, and brooded on them, I read about music, I formed and occasionally shared opinions of music. It's thus very odd now, in a period when I'm not doing those things, to try to sum up what I thought in a time I did....
Coming up with a list, then, is troublesome - a lot more difficult than coming up with a list of favorite films was. The sense of distance from music I have been talking about it - but only part. There's also the fact that I have never documented my music purchases and likes and dislikes as obsessively as I do my film watching. And there's the fact that, looking back at things I bought, listened to, liked in the last decade, I'm reminded how often and how much my tastes have changed. Not that I stop liking things - what I liked in 2002 I like today (what I liked in 1986 I like today; most of what I liked in 1978 I like today) - but I go on binges, getting semi-obsessed with one type of music or other, then moving to something else. This can be quite extreme - I spent the first half of the 90s listening almost exclusively to jazz, ignoring rock, barely even listening to my favorites. But I moved through jazz history, and by 95 or 96 had reached John McLaughlin and Sonny Sharrock, and then it was a simple thing to shift back to Richard Thompson and Pere Ubu, and next thing I know, I'm buying rock records again (Built to Spill, Tool, PJ Harvey among the first new artists to catch my ear), and there you go.... So in the 00s - I started the decade listening to a lot of old and new punk (Minutemen; Sleater-Kinney & The White Stripes) and guitar stuff (AC/DC, Black Sabbath, Neil Young; Built to Spill, a new commitment to the Rolling Stones, etc.) - discovered Japanese punk (Boredoms) and neo-prog (Mercury Rev) and combined them (Acid Mothers Temple; Ghost); had a run of listening to lots of extreme stuff (Keiji Haino, Soft Machine and Van Der Graf Generator, Krautrock, Pete Cosey era Miles, Derek Bailey) - until I started listening to new folk (Devendra Banhardt, Neutral Milk Hotel), combined in turn with noise and prog (Six Organs of Admittance; Ghost again, Sigur Rus.) And then the Liars came out and I got obsessed with post-punk - Gang of Four and PIL - but that was like picking up an old thread, filling in the gaps, buying the albums of songs I liked in 1983 or 84 - I was, from the time I heard them, a Pere Ubu and Joy Division fan, so this Gang of Four/PIL/Wire enthusiasm was building on old loves.... Meanwhile, I liked their contemporary imitators, though only the Liars really convinced me... And then TV on the Radio came out and, you know, whatever that led to, not to mention the complications of getting more obsessed by Boris, the Melvins, Mono, etc. ca. 2007... What do you do?
It means that now, looking back, I don't entirely know what to do with the decade. Sometimes, the music I bought in the 00s looks like it was collected by 4 different people - and each one seems to jump up and insist on their judgments being the right one. Can one person really get as enthusiastic about Mercury Rev, The Liars, The Crane Wife, Rainbow, "Halfway Home" or "Only the Sun Knows" or "Casimir Pulaski Day" as I have been? Apparently so. But it makes for a particularly uncertain kind of list-making... Though I suppose there are constants: electric guitars - soloists - drums - and I guess a back of the mind love of melodies (the Smokey Robinson effect, call it.)
So then - here it is - my favorite 25 records of the 2000s:
1. Mercury Rev - All is Dream
2. David Sylvian - Blemish
3. White Stripes - White Blood Cells
4. Boris (with Michio Kurihara) - Rainbow
5. The Liars - They Were Wrong So We Drowned
6. Earth (with Bill Frisell) - The Bees Made Money in the Lion's Skull
7. TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain
8. The Decembrists - The Crane Wife
9. Danielson Famille - Fetch the Compass Kids
10. PJ Harvey - Songs from the City, Stories from the Sea
11. Grinderman - Grinderman
12. Scott Walker - The Drift
13. Six Organs of Admittance - The Sun Awakens
14. TV on the Radio - Dear Science
15. White Stripes - Icky Thump
16. Sigur Rus - Hvarf/Heim
17.Godspeed You Black Emperor - Lift Your Skinny Fists to to Heaven
18.Radiohead - Kid A
19.Outkast - Speakerboxx/The Love Below
20.Sonic Youth - Murray Street
21. Ghost - Hypnotic Underworld
22. David Sylvian - Manofan
23. Damon and Naomi With Ghost
25. Gomez - Split the Difference
25. Devendra Banhardt - Rejoicing in the Hands
...and since that seems - incomplete - close contenders, might include:
Acid Mothers Temple - La Novia, Geocrentric Worlds of the Acid Mothers Temple
Boris - Pink
Deerhoof - Reveille, Apple O'
Sigur Rus ()
Derek Bailey - Mirakle
Devendra Banhardt - Cripple Creek
Earth - some combination - a reminder, maybe, that sometimes bands as a whole make more impression than individual records...
The Fire Theft - the Fire Theft
Ghost - In Stormy Nights
Jay Farrar - Sebastapol
Kills - Keep on your Mean Side
Loretta Lynn - Van Lear Rose
MIA - Arular
MIssion of Burma - Obliterati
Modest Mouse - The Moon and Antartctica
Nick Cave & Bad Seeds - any? all?
Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are you the Destroyer?
Ruins - Tzamborgha
Six Organs of Admittance - Compathia, Dark Noontide
Sonic Youth - The Eternal
TV on the Radio - Desperate Youth, Bloodthirsty Babes
...though that is still awfully arbitrary... I think I may need another post like this, dedicated to my favorite bands of the 00s - I think I will put that off, though, and try to write more about those bands, when I post it. I'll stay with straight lists here....
And songs? I will stick to a top 10. And say that I don't listen to the radio enough to make any distinction between album cuts and singles, and most of the stuff I listen to barely registers as singles anyway - still...
1. Damon and Naomi (with Ghost) - I Dreamed of the Caucuses
2. Sufjian Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day
3. Mercury Rev - Hercules
4. David Sylvian - The Heart Knows Better
5. Radiohead - Idioteque
6. TV on the Radio - Halfway Home
7. Six Organs of Admittance - Only the Sun Knows
8. Boris - Rainbow
9. Decembrists - The Crane Wife 3
10. Modest Mouse - Dark Center of the Universe
And finally - since Michio Kurihara plays on what seems like half the records and songs on these lists - I'll leave you with Kurihara, playing with Boris, Rainbow, live, getting as much from about 3 notes as can be gotten...
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3 comments:
Nice list, I've heard a good portion of those and like most of the ones I've heard. I'm especially happy to see David Sylvian popping up, and so high at that. I know a lot of people came to his 2000s records with knowledge of his previous career, but for me Blemish was my introduction to him: I couldn't resist the idea of an avant-song record with Bailey and Fennesz playing on it, and I was very impressed. In many ways, I was even more blown away by Manafon, which managed to take a virtual who's who of contemporary improv and build a suite of compelling, emotionally intense songs around their sounds.
Others I really like here: Earth (especially The Bees Made Honey, their best album), Scott Walker, GYBE, Murray Street (the last great SY album? so far it seems so, anyway), Of Montreal, Kid A, OutKast, Boris, Devendra Banhart, Six Organs (especially Compathia), etc.
Never really got into the Liars or White Stripes, for similar reasons. They do what they do well enough, but what they do is cover ground that was pretty well-trod by earlier, better bands. I'd rather just put on some PIL or Gang of Four than a Liars record.
Blemish was the first David Sylvian I heard, too - I read about it somewhere (maybe Wire magazine, or something to do with Derek Bailey) - I got it, liked it, and find myself liking it more all the time... slots in with a few others - experimental crooners like Scott Walker or Robert Wyatt, maybe Richard Youngs... I like Manofan, though it's been harder to get into it... I could probably put Nine Horses on this list somewhere too - that's another nice record.
I know what you mean about the Liars and White Stripes, but sometimes doing a good thing well is more than enough. The Liars at their best have songs that, I think, work on their own - it's odd, they might be as slavishly retro now as the Lyres were in the 80s, but they both do it well enough that I don't care. (Nor can I resist a pun like that...)
Pretty much the same with the White Stripes - they write good songs. (Probably doesn't hurt that they actually sound like the Lyres themselves, but that might be a different matter.)
That is a great list! Mercury rev is one of my all time favorites Dave Fridmann is my hero and Donahue has my all time favorite voice. All is dream is definitely on my top 5 for favorite albums
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