Favorite Albums of the Decade

OK, so I'm pompous and pretentious, but also prone to procrastination. So here, a little late, is my list of my favorite albums of the wretched decade from which we've just escaped. I won't say "best," because there's a lot of stuff I still haven't listened to; I'll stick with "favorite," because no one can argue with that. Still, I'd love to hear any commentary and feedback. Without further ado, here it is...


1) Alligator by The National – From the lush opening chords of “Secret Meeting” to the unconventionally energetic closer, “Mr. November,” this is simply a stunning album. I reviewed it at more length here on Amazon, but here’s what you most need to know: the choruses are memorable and mesmerizing, and the music is lush and rich, dark and delicious; somehow it manages to be mellow and intense at the same time. Also, unlike so many musicians that romanticize and fetishize the blue-collar life, these guys actually sing about those of us in the white-collar world. In short, this is a band and an album after my own dark Irish soul.

2) Yankee Hotel Foxtrot by Wilco – In some ways, this was the defining album of the decade, as far as the music industry was concerned; this was the tipping point, the moment when bands started to be able to take control of their music back from the major labels. Fortunately the songs and the album were up to the task; the album flows together beautifully, with dark tales of alcoholism and urban alienation that also somehow managed to capture post-9/11 angst despite being written beforehand.

3) Good News for People Who Love Bad News by Modest Mouse – OK, it’s hip to like Lonesome Crowded West and The Moon and Antarctica more, but for my money this is the best thing they’ve ever done. “Float On” is one of those rare classics that’s so perfect that, when you first hear it, you have a hard time believing it somehow didn’t always exist, and “The Good Times are Killing Me” has one of those choruses that’s so perfect you kick yourself for not thinking of it first. The wordplay and music are pretty excellent throughout, though; "Bukowski" is an awesome and cynical and incredibly well-written meditation on alcoholism and faith, and the line “Are you dead or are you sleeping? God I sure hope you are dead!” on "Satin in a Coffin" is one of my favorite couplets in all of recorded music. On its own, it’s great, but the insane manic glee with which Isaac Brock delivers the line captures everything that’s awesome about this group.

4) Stankonia by Outkast – This album’s an embarrassment of riches, full of incredible tracks like “So Fresh, So Clean” and “Mrs. Jackson” that are among the best rap singles ever recorded; I would have ranked it higher but for the fact it’s just too damn long. Still, I can’t complain, and I really wish the group was still putting together albums like this.

5) Ys. by Joanna Newsom – Some people bag on this album for the strange quality of her voice, but for me that’s one of many many reasons to love it. She has this great folk troubadour vibe, plus the daring to actually construct songs that are 10-15 minutes long—and, most importantly, the skills to pull it all off without making it feel like a cute gimmick. The arrangements—mostly harp and strings—are brilliant, and unlike almost everything else I can think of. It moves and flows in its own unique way and on its own terms; like all the best art, it creates its own world, and pulls you into it so completely that you forget that it is, in fact, a creation.

6) St. Elsewhere by Gnarls Barkley – “Crazy” was so perfect and so overplayed that I think a lot of people missed out on the awesomeness of the rest of the album; it is weird and wonderful and funky and fun and genuinely different from a lot of what’s out there; the extensive use of gospel-tinged vocal stylings with Danger Mouse’s awesome beats just made this a really great album. (I reviewed it at more length here on Amazon.) If there’s a problem, it’s that the group copied themselves too slavishly on their follow-up, right down to the opening projector noises.

7) Untrue by Burial – I also wrote at length about this album here on Amazon, but the distilled version is this: Techno was supposed to be the music of the future, and somehow it didn’t happen, but if more of it was this excellent, perhaps it would have. Most other albums of electronic music end up sounding like Back To The Future’s Hill Valley, circa 2015; everything’s impossibly bright and precise and upbeat. This album’s like Blade Runner, gritty and dark and real.

8) In Rainbows by Radiohead – It’s kinda hip to like Kid A more, and I do love that album, but I think this is better: more song-based, with really top-notch lyrics and excellent musicianship from one of the few bands that manages to be both cerebral and awesome. These songs are warmer than almost anything else in their catalog, but still there’s a lot of the alienation we’ve come to know and love, and to expect, from Thom Yorke. Perhaps the only problem is that the band’s initial release, while an awesome experiment in fan trust and music industry paradigm destruction, also distracted people a little from the excellence of the music—and provided an unnecessarily inferior product, in that the files were only sampled at 160 kbps. For my money, it’s actually worth shilling out for the CD if you only have the pay-what-you-want downloads; if you haven't done so, you owe it to yourself to hear the full richness of the songs as they were actually recorded.

9) Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer? by Of Montreal – Somehow this album is freaky and funky and fun, even though listening to the lyrics is like watching the romantic equivalent of a car crash. There’s a great line on “Bunny Ain’t No Kind of Rider” that’s something like: “Saw a hot girl kissing girls, what a shock, said you must be an artist.” For me, that’s pretty much the awesomest snide commentary on urban hipsterism ever put to verse. But the best part of the album is its centerpiece track, “The Past Is a Grotesque Animal,” which does an incredible job at being simultaneously intense, long, and profound.

10) Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie – Some hipsters I know love to bag on this group, but if it were easy to make albums that felt so effortlessly perfect, more people would do it. For me, this somehow represents the amalgamation of all the angst and uncertainty of early twentysomething life, the uncomfortable but strangely exhilarating feeling of being broke and lovesick at the same time. It inexplicably took me a couple years to buy it, but somehow—possibly because the baristas at my coffee shop also loved it—when I look back on 2003 and 2004, this is the soundtrack that’s playing in my head.