Why don’t more people come out and make the really obvious statement that this album is just an attempt to rework ‘In a Priest Driven Ambulance’ into a formula that is more impressive to hot girls than it is to acid dealers?
49. ‘Chinese Democracy’ – Guns N’ Roses
Included in this list predominatly for the fact that it sounds exactly as I dreamed it would. Axl has clearly been utterly consumed, artistically compelled to create the world’s greatest ever album for the past 17 years. He failed by miles, but what we are left with is utterly fascinating record which when it occasionally strikes gold, reveals God in it’s details. For my money, this is the best Guns N’ Roses album.
48. ‘Dream Island Laughing Language’ – Lucky Dragons
What sucks is that I have never seen these guys live. Apparently they hand out brightly-coloured electrodes out to the audience and everyone hold hands and weird electronic noises are created, and it’s so good that people don’t even realise they're being hippies. On record, Lucky Dragons sit somewhere between a more cacophonous High Places and a less cerebral Fridge with clipped gongs and weird ethnic instruments, colliding with drum machines, chimes and cut-up vocals in the mix. These guys are definitely vegans.
47. ‘Definition of Real’ – Plies
This album is so fucking lacking in intellectual worth, it’s basically the hip-hop equivalent of when you got a shitty mark on a test paper back at school and went round showing off to your friends about it.
46. ‘Sick to Death’ – Eat Skull
As the other Siltbreeze band people seem to know, Eat Skull’s ‘Sick to Death’ is the older, grubby brother of its artier sibling ‘Rip It Off’ by Times New Viking. To extend the metaphor, this record is the kind of kid who is always covered in cuts and brusies, who pulls the wings off flies and burns them with its magnifiying glass. This really is shitty recording for shitty recording’s sake and I just happen to think recording your band shittily as an end in itself is absolutely awesome.
45. ‘Weezer’ (The Red Album) – Weezer
The pre-release hype on this one was that it was going to fuse everything that is brilliant about Weezer together (i.e. everything except ‘Make Believe’), then we’d forget that they actually went to the effort of recording ‘We Are All on Drugs’ and then releasing it as a single, world peace would ensue and we’d all laugh at Rivers Cuomo’s ironic moustache together in blissful harmony. It never happened, but their third self-titled album is a million miles away from the infinite suckness that was its predecessor. It’s basically Weezer on autopilot, which is absoloutely great and loads of fun. Thanks.
44. ‘The Cool’ – Lupe Fiasco
Lupe Fiasco’s debut ‘Food & Liquor’ had the weight of expectation on its shoulders, and boy did it sound like it – perhaps coming-off too expansive and grandiose than any debut rap LP has the right to. ‘The Cool’ readresses this balance, retaining its predecessor’s ambition, whilst not afraid to, you know, feature a fun, easy-on-the ear hip-pop radio jam like ‘Superstar’. Lupe himself seems more at home amonst the less portentous musical scenery, allowing his creativity to hit its peak-to-date on tracks such as ‘Gotta Eat’ where he trades off the evils of dope-slinging and fast food against each other to stunning effect. If he raises the bar as much again on his next (and supposedly final) LP then he’ll be in with a shot of recording this milennium’s own ‘The Low End Theory’. (F.Y.I. I don’t really like that album, but everyone else seems to).
43. ‘HLLLYH’ – The Mae Shi
I know what you’re thinking – “not another band from The fucking Smell” and I’d agree with you. However, although they give off the impression of a bunch of dudes let loose in a music store on their skateboards (or in a skateboard shop with their musical instruments – whichever you’d prefer), nothing could be further from the truth. Just listen to this record carefully – something this complex and intricate, has obviously been tweaked and laboured over by its creators with microscopic precision in order to attain the most fun results physically possible. Also, twenty five bonus point for including a megamix of all the tracks on the album in the middle of the album.
42. ‘Get Awkward’ – Be Your Own Pet
These guys really shouldn’t have split up – it would’ve been so awesome if they had just continued making the same record until one of them died and they were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame when they were about 65 and really embarassing.
41. ‘Distortion’ – The Magnetic Fields
Conceptual to the core, Stephin Merritt led the Magnetic Fields into a swathes of Jesus & Mary Chain inspired fuzz for this pretty self-explanatorily-titled album . Not only guitars are overdriven - everything from pianos, drums, bass and strings are totally doused in saturated, buzzing, distortion. A Place to Bury Strangers this is not however, underneath the stylistic cloak, lies Merritt’s typically literate, tongue-in-cheek wordplay, and if you look hard enough beneath that, perhaps something approaching genuine emotion.
40. ‘Hercules and Love Affair’ – Hercules and Love Affair
As a label, DFA is relentlessly tasteful and consistent – almost to a fault (but not quite). Looking back at their catalogue, spanning everything from Black Dice to The Juan Maclean, via the only good song The Rapture ever did, it’s actually verging on frustrating how on point this label has been for the best part of a decade. Hercules and Love Affair is a project steeped in 80’s disco-house, and inevitably the production is absolutely immaculate. It’s one of those records where you give at least a ‘7’ just for the reverb-tails on the marraccas. This is no mere outing in simulacra however, the record is also emotionally a total winner, bursting with heart courtesy of the frequent melodic input of Anony Hegarty (of Antony & the Johnsons). It looks as though it could be a little while longer before we can enjoy that backlash.
39. ‘Initiations’ – Burial Hex
Oooh hello scary man with your power electronics and blackened, idustrial misanthropy, can we have some more of this please? The new Bloc Party album just isn’t doing it for us.
38. ‘Elephant Shell’ – Tokyo Police Club
I genuinely thought these guys could be the new The Strokes. They’re good looking, write rad songs and have lyrics that don’t make sense. If the general public thought this was enough to start a cultural revolution in 2001, I don’t know why they’re so indifferent to it now.
37. ‘Pretty. Odd’ – Panic at the Disco
Oasis would be so much cooler if they realised that The Beatles were a bunch of pretty boys making orchestral pop music, constantly perplexing their fans in the process, whilst retaining a hardcore following of underage girls who really wanted to give them blow jobs.
36. ‘The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull’ – Earth
The Earth of today is a very different band to the one who released 1993’s ‘Earth 2’ masterpiece – where that record (and I’m going to steal a phrase I read somewhere) sounds like “grunge liquified”, ‘The Bees Made Honey in the Lion’s Skull’ is more like Neil Young’s soundtrack to Jim Jarmusch’s ‘Dead Man’, being liquified, but very…..v---e----r--y s----l—o—w----l--y. The lack of information between notes on this record being as vital as the arrangments themselves – new empires have time to rise and fall between the solemn reach of every chord. With Dylan Carson passing the mantle of downtuned Sabbath-inspired extremity on to Sunn 0))) (who legend has it started as an Earth tribute band), this deeply-philosophical, Spaghetti Western funeral-march sees Earth once again enter the saloon of greatness.
35. ‘2’ – Semifinalists
I am in no way biased or exaggerating when I say Ferry Gouw is the most talented person I personally know. Inbetween doing the artwork for our releases here at Meal Deal, directing far-out videos for the likes of Lightspeed Champion and Bloc Party and dressing really well, he’s in the most underrated band the world has ever seen. I mean who else has thought of making a record that could soundtrack a high-school dance at the end of a John Hughes movie as seen through the eyes of the protagonist from a Daniel Clowes graphic novel?
34. ‘21’ – Mystery Jets
In the past, Mystery Jets had always been the kind of band I’d admire from afar, like the kind of girl you know is pretty, but ultimately they’re just not your type. With ‘21’ however, everything changed, the departure of quite literal father figure Henry Harrison along with the arrival of producer Erol Alkan allowed the band to embrace a sound which incorporated Brian Ferry saxophones, faultless harmonies, 80’s synths and the experience of being young, creative and in love written so perfectly, that this can’t be considered anything other than the best guitar-pop record made by a British band this year.
33. ‘All Hope Is Gone’ – Slipknot
After the pretty momumental ‘Vol 3: The Sublimal Verses’ seemed to bring natural closure to the Slipknot saga, (to make a shitty pun) all hope was gone that they would return with another album, let alone one as furious as this. From the outset, ‘All Hope Is Gone’ burns with an anger not heard since ‘Iowa’ became the most extreme album ever to get to hit #1 both sides of the Atlantic. There are however, a couple of ballads on the album and these do sound a bit like Staind (memo: Staind have a couple of big jams).
32. ‘Falling Off the Lavender Bridge’ – Lightspeed Champion
Post Test Icicles, hooking up with in-house Saddle Creek producer Mike Mogis and writing a record inspired in equal parts by Cass McCombs, Bright Eyes, and hanging out with Peaches Geldof at parties in Dalston wasn’t exactly what the world was expecting from Dev Hynes – well, apart from the last part maybe. ‘Falling Off the Lavender Bridge’ is however, an admirably ambitious, occasionally brilliant and frequently touching insight into the psyche of this exceptionally gifted songwriter , it’s folk-inflected melancholy (almost certainly intentionally) lightyears apart from his previous group’s vivid, day-glo screamo. A autumnal record, in the best sense, and one which perhaps only hints at the greatness that this man is capable of.
31. ‘What You Don’t Know Is Frontier’ – Asva
Consumed with anguish by the premature death of his brother, Stuart Dahlquist, along with ex-members of Burning Witch and other doom luminaries, decamped to the mountains to record this hugely emotive record of dramatic art-metal. Like a more religious Sunn 0))), guitars rumble blackly, with holy Church organs bringing with them a pervading sense of melancholy. It never sinks into bleak moroseness though, as its creator notes, “What You Don't Know Is Frontier is about rebirth… about that light at the end of the tunnel. Amen.” Indeed, this record stops only just short of being a total masterpiece.
30. ‘Devotion’ – Beach House
Ripping off how you'd imagine Mazzy Star would sound if they were forced to eat a ton of hash brownies and then play 'Among My Swan' on a really hot summer's day is such an obvious idea, that I can't believe no one has thought of it before.
29. ‘The Devil, You + Me’ – The Notwist
In the six years since their last release, the almost-perfect ‘Neon Golden’, it’s as though The Notwist have been hermetically sealed in their own world, wrapped in a blanket of warm melancholy, totally oblivious to musical trends and the passing of time. Once again, ‘The Devil, You + Me’ is a understatement of the most beautiful kind, a deeply cerebral, yet hushed, sad, poignant and natural album of sad electronica. I find it really weird that these guys used to be a hardcore band.
28. ‘Nouns’ – No Age
No Age are a couple of vegan pancake-eating, all-ages-party-throwing dudes who have more than paid their dues in the hardcore scene in their previous incarnation as Wives, so how they became so fucking big is kind of weird. What isn’t surprsing after hearing last year’s collection of E.P.’s ‘Weirdo Rippers’ is the quality of ‘Nouns’. It’s a single coherent statement that hangs together by its own logic – a record where ambient noise can sit next to grunge rock jams without it ever sounding anything more or less than a couple of guys making some noise and having fun with it. ‘Gnarly’ being the only appropriate adjective to describe it all really.
27. ‘Crystal Castles’ – Crystal Castles
Don’t hate – fact is ‘Crystal Castles’ is one of the year’s strongest records. Whether your scepticism is borne of their pretty lame Suicide meets electroclash posturing, their way too calculated “fuck you” attitude, or even just that guy’s massive nose sticking out from the front cover of NME, the music on this album is nothing short of spectacular almost from start to finish. What’s more as the elctronic squalls and diced vocals fade into a final track which sounds a bit like ‘Daydream’ off ‘Gish’ by Smashing Pumpkins, it’s clear that these guys could have another great record in them. (Then they’ll probably go shit on their third album – just like Suicide).
26. ‘Saturdays = Youth’ – M83
Much has been made of ‘Saturdays = Youth’ being Anthony Gonzalez’s nostalgia album – in fact he has publically said that this album has as much to do with John Hughes’ movies as it does with his record collection. If there’s any evidence of this, it’s that the record sounds like 2005’s ‘Before the Dawn Heals Us’, but set on Earth as opposed to trying to soar around its stratosphere. Whilst the emotional scope and ambition of M83’s earlier album has been reduced, what we get as a trade-off is Gonzalez is wrapping his natural gift for melody around some of his best and most straightforward songwriting to date, which on ‘Graveyard Girl’ strangely sounds a bit like early The Stone Roses.
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