Top 20 Albums of the Decade

January 12, 2010

***Please excuse the length, navel-gazing, indie-cred destroying and live-journal-worthiness of the entry below***

So there are a million things I should probably be updating about, seeing as I haven’t done so since it was still 2009. But I wanted to think about something else besides what I did for new year’s and the week after. Namely what my favorite albums of the decade were. See I read the pitchfork lists for the best albums of the decade and the year, and while I agreed with a lot of them, they felt really impersonal and predetermined. So as I have in the past, I felt the urge to make my own list that’s explicitly personal and messy, but as accurate as I can be. I like doing these lists, because I relate to the world through music, and it’s possible to relate to me, I think, by listening to the same music as I do, and seeing the same things as I do when I listen to it. See my old Livejournal end-of-the-year round-ups (and list of my hundred favorite songs of all time circa 2006) for other examples and defenses of these lists (as if you’d want more after reading this one). I decided to rank these, because it’s doable for the 20 albums I’m sharing about. For all that’s been written about the death of the album and the rise of the culture of the downloadable single, I still listen to albums first, and then if I have to, pick through the songs to find the ones worth listening to over and over again. And while I love mixes, I will always be more amazed by albums that manage to capture magic not just during a few of their parts, but capture enough to transcend their parts and become something bigger, and more special in my memory.

20. The Decemberists - The Crane Wife

A great album, one of the rare ones I anticipated feverishly and felt actually delivered upon arrival. From the sweetness of the 3 part ¨Crane Wife¨ tracks to the furious synth climax of ¨The Island¨ to the always calming, optimism-inspiring ¨Sons and Daughters,¨ it earns its place on this list. It lands in last place because of the pointlessly bludgeoning ¨When the War Came¨ and the meandering ¨Shankill Butchers,¨ which I always skip. All records have their weak tracks, but the best ones at least manage to have listenable songs between the highlights.

19. The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

Another album filled with highlights (¨Fight Test,¨ ¨Yoshimi,¨ ¨Do You Realize?¨) but unfortunately a lot of filler too. But the highlights totally merit its place as one of my favorite albums of the aughts. Yoshimi is one of the songs I learned early into my guitar-playing career that´s so burned into my muscle memory that I´d still feel comfortable playing it in public today, after not having played hardly anything for 4 months. If I made a list of my favorite songs of the decade, "Do You Realize?" would almost certainly be in the top spot. I once chose it as a song I would listen to on infinite repeat if I were doomed to only listen to one song for the rest of my life; that hasn't changed in the last four years.

18. The Strokes – Is This It?

This is an album that stands out with Weezer’s Green Album as an album I associate with the summer of 2001. It’s a summer album, through and through, but it also has an innocence to it you’re not apt to hear on much else that’s come out since then. Back then, it was possible to just be 5 shaggy hipsters from New York enjoying being hyped as the year 2000’s answer to the Beatles. They weren’t that, but damn if this album isn’t catchy, and to this day reminds me of warm, lazy days of waking up late, driving around in my friends’ cars, going to shows, and putting off worrying about tomorrow to enjoy today.


17. Regina Spektor – The half of Begin to Hope and the half of Soviet Kitsch I put together for car rides with Dawn

Technically should probably be disqualified since it’s not a real record, but hey, it’s my list and I do what I want. And I loved this record, and spent more than half of the car rides to Holt from East Lansing I took with Dawn doing our pre-internship teaching and observation listening to it. I’m always happy when I can pass on music that someone else genuinely loves, and tells/shows me that they do (like when they leave a record playing in their car for months). And it was a balanced, excellent mix of the highlights from the two albums: Fidelity/Better/Samson/On the Radio/Hotel Song/(maybe That Time?)/Summer in the City from Begin to Hope leading into Poor Little Rich Boy/Us/***/Your Honor/Ghost of Corporate Future/Somedays from Soviet Kitsch. If I were doing it again, I’d leave off “Poor Little Rich Boy” and tack “Braille” onto the end, but for what I knew of her catalogue at the time, it was a good mix. A lot of those songs are probably always going to be tied to college and the girls I knew there, and I can’t say I listen to them very often anymore for that reason, but that doesn’t take away from how important they were to me at the time.

16. The White Stripes – White Blood Cells

An album that got me used to and turned me on to ever weirder music. It came out just as I was starting to learn guitar, and I remember struggling to play “Fell In Love With A Girl” as frenetically as Jack White, before giving up and learning how to hoot and holler “Hotel Yorba” instead, which is another song I have in my bones now and will probably never lose. It’s overly long as an album, in my opinion, and could stand to have two or three of the last few tracks axed, maintaining for sure the strong first 8 tracks, “Aluminum,” and the pretty piano outro of “This Protector.” Although they’d go on to make more cohesive albums in the future, none quite managed to out-do White Blood Cells, which is the Stripes at their most reckless and inventive, I think.

15. Ted Leo & The Pharmacists – Shake The Sheets

This album starts with the words “I was walking through a life one morning” and ends with a song extolling how much walking is left to do. I can’t think of another album that has an opening/closing duo as strong as “Me and Mia” and “Walking To Do” from Shake The Sheets. Luckily for the album, the whole first half after that first song is amazing, and the second half only has a couple forgivable misses thrown in with a couple decent songs before the closer redeems all. But it’s really the opener and the closer that put this album onto this list; they are both full of optimism, and make me feel like getting out of my chair and doing something when they come on, and doing whatever it is I’m going to do at full tilt, because like the man says, “if you believe in something beautiful, then get up and be it!”

14. The Eels – Blinking Lights and Other Revelations

It’s E’s magnum opus, that follows someone who often bears a surprising resemblance to himself from cradle to grave over two discs of music. It’s perhaps overly ambitious, sometimes dreary and slow, and probably 7 or 8 tracks too long; but in between all these faults is full of feeling. Like the feeling of a little kid looking out at the world for the first time (A Magic World); the feeling of being rejected by a girl for the first time (Trouble With Dreams); the feeling of being left behind by the world (Railroad Man); the feeling of accepting how painful and ridiculous life is (Hey Man (Now You’re Really Living)); the feeling of loving someone deeply who will never love you back in the same way (Ugly Love); the feeling of losing the person closest to you (The Stars Shine In The Sky Tonight); and the feeling of having lived a good long life you’d love to live again (Things The Grandchildren Should Know). They’re feelings I’ve all had at one point or another to some degree, and it was good to know I wasn’t the only one who felt them.

13. Bright Eyes – I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning

This will always be the album that came out the day after Emily Beam dumped me my freshmen year of college, and two days before the loneliest birthday of my life. It was before I had alcohol to help me cope with feeling utterly devastated, so that week, I used this album to help me make it through. I’ll never forget how giddily ridiculous I felt skipping down Grand River before breaking into a run after the intro to “At The Bottom Of Everything” sped up the first time I heard it. Or how viscerally cold it was while I dragged myself to class listening to “Lua.” Or pretending I was sitting at a piano while sitting at my keyboard being consoled by my friends while listening to “Poison Oak.” And I won’t forget listening to “Road to Joy” on my way back from the post-breakup conversation I had with Emily where she said she still wanted to be friends with me and feeling like I was going to be ok. I don’t listen to it much anymore, since it’s so tied to that specific moment in my life, but it is objectively by far the best album in Conor Oberst’s catalogue, and subjectively one that belongs on this list.

12. The Electric Six – Fire

YES! I’ve seen The Six six or seven times in concert, they’ve put out five or six albums this decade, each one with diminishing returns, but the songs on this album still make them worth going back to see again and again. I will never get tired of yelling “Fire in the Disco! Fire in the, Taco Bell!”, or “Girl, I wanna take you to a Gay Bar!” while feeling the energy levels of somewhere between 50 and 500 people spike at the same time all around me, jumping up and down and pumping my fist in the air. While their latter-day albums are mostly misses you have to dig through to find the hits, this album was full of catchy dance anthems, with only one or two that hit sour notes.

11. Sleater-Kinney – The Woods

In ninth grade, I fell violently in love with the Smashing Pumpkins just as they were on the verge of breaking up, so much so that I contemplated using Ebay for the first time to buy ridiculously expensive tickets to their sold-out last show at the Metro in Chicago. I let reason win out on that one, since I couldn’t even drive at the time, and barely had enough money to my name to buy a ticket. To this day, I wish I could’ve seen the show, though.

Sleater-Kinney hit me at a different time in my life, but in the same way, and at the same time in the band’s lifecycle. I downloaded “Jumpers” off of Pitchfork on a lark, and proceeded to listen to it on repeat for several days. I had just gotten back from Ecuador, and when Carrie Brownstein screams “the coldest winter that I ever saw was the summer that I spent…” and then trails off, I knew exactly what she was talking about. I went out and bought the album at FBC, and it became a staple in my car, especially for highway driving. I loved the raw power of it, the way their guitars sounded as if they were constantly cranked up to 11, and the way the drums thundered. I could appreciate “Jumpers” without thinking about becoming one myself; could enjoy the 11-minute ode to sex “Let’s Call It Love” even though I’d never had any; and could listen to “Modern Girl” and find myself whistling along to the harmonica solo days later. Since this was the summer after my second year of college, I could drive, and had money, so I made sure I got a ticket to Lollapalooza, and saw their third-to-last show. It was incredible, and I’m glad I had the chance to see it.

10. Jay-Z – American Gangster

In time, I came to enjoy Jay’s half-fictional career retrospective through the eyes of the famous drug dealer Frank Lucas as much or more than his actual career retrospective, The Black Album. That album has bigger highlights, which it trades off for cohesion, since it’s produced by a dozen different producers. This one, which didn’t actually soundtrack the movie, plays like a movie itself, with gritty rising action (American Dreamin’, No Hook) leading to celebrations and good times (Roc Boys, Party Life) that eventually lead to overconfidence and self-aggrandizement (Say Hello, Success) that quickly brings about self-destruction (Fallin’, Blue Magic). An arc many would say Jay’s career itself followed, with the release of the two critically and commercially panned albums that bookend this one in his post-retirement catalogue. I think it’s a lot more honest story arc than the traditional Hollywood rising action leads to conflict which gets resolved before the characters get married and live happily ever after. Jay’s flow is what makes it worth listening to, though, as it always has been: “Blame Reagan for makin’ me to a monster/blame Oliver North and Iran Contra/I ran contraband that they sponsored/before this rhymin’ stuff we was in concert,” “That’s old-school to the new crew/they doin’ numbers like Sudoku,” and “Keep my movements smooth while maneuverin’/through all the manure in the sewer that I grew up in,” are a few excellently structured rhymes that stand out in my memory.

9. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

Sam tried to turn me onto this album in high school, but I just wasn’t ready then. It took me until Jeff played it a few times during my freshmen year of college that it finally clicked for me, and I got it. It is the kind of album that inspires fan fiction; the kind that soundtracks late-night walks around campus and the city; the kind that you can shout along the lyrics to with friends at a show after destroying your car on some dude’s prized mailbox, or pluck out on guitar yourself while privately wishing you could convey to someone that while you had a lot of reservations, they weren’t about her. Did that make sense? That’s ok; the album’s lyrics are generally kind of opaque anyways. It’s sonically gorgeous, and will always call up disjointed memories of Chicago in the summer, Sam and Jeff, being at shows outside, the round apartment towers on the front cover, and a dude talking about his regrets outside his girl’s apartment door while the camera fades to black, refusing to reveal if he ever made amends with her.

8. Jay-Z – The Black Album

An album so good, it earns every boast Jay makes about it during its magnificent 13-song hit-parade. I’m unaware of another song that makes crime sound as cool as it does on “Allure,” and I know there are plenty out there that have tried. “99 Problems” is a song so lyrically inspired that I decided to commit it to memory, and have surprised many a friend by launching headfirst into it when asked to. “December 4th” is poignant, and sweetly narrated by Jay’s mom, and even though I know it’s his life, and is mostly about dealing drugs and growing up to be a famous rapper (two things I’ve never done), I feel like the last lines of the last verse could describe my life, and are pretty universally applicable: “And it’s nobody’s fault; I made the decisions I made! This is the life I chose; or rather the life that chose me!” This was the first rap album I truly loved as an album, not just for the singles. Jay stays true to Biggie’s words that he quotes at the beginning of album-ending “My First Song:” “The key to staying on top of things is to treat everything like it’s your first project… just stay hungry.” It’s a magician’s trick that he pulls off that feeling on what he was calling his final album at that time.

7. Titus Andronicus – The Airing of Grievances

The last great new album I heard before leaving the states. It came out in 2008, which I prefer to think says a lot about the music that came out in the first half of 2009, as opposed to indicating how old and fogeyish and out of touch I got during that period. It was an album that spoke to where I was during the spring of last year: so done with school in Baltimore, and so exasperated with the final flaming medical hoops I had to hurl myself through for the Peace Corps that I was in desperate need of an Albert Camus-quoting noise-pop band screaming “because the more we think/the less it all makes sense/tonight we will drink/to our general indifference!” at me. Every song on the album is full of restless, pissed-off energy, and each one is balanced by clever wordplay and catchy melodies. It is one of the only albums on this list that I never skip songs on, because every one is seriously as good as the next, and skipping would mess with the wonderful pacing of the album, that has its slower moments specifically so that they can explode into noisy guitar assaults immediately after they’re done. It is an album unconcerned with offending people’s senses and sensibilities; it is an album that’s unapologetically fun in spite of coming out of New Jersey and inspired by a life that’s been “a long, sick, game of would-you-rather…”. A band I’d have never listened to had I not taken Kim to New York to see Los Campesinos! for Valentine’s Day last year, and seen them open.

6. Kanye West – Graduation

It’s weird how albums get so tied up in my mind with the things that were happening around me while I was really into them. Like it’s hard for me to hear “Flashing Lights” without feeling a little of the dull, cold, paralyzing ache I remember feeling driving home from Everett, the high school I student-taught at in Lansing, on freezing fall nights after working long, exhausting days. It’s hard to hear “Stronger” now without thinking back to those first few days of school, when it was my mantra for getting through them. It’s hard to hear “Big Brother” now without remembering back to the day I rapped the part with “translate Español: No Way José” in it to one of the kids in my third hour. It’s hard to hear “I Wonder” without thinking back to the times I listened to it on my bed while procrastinating on planning lessons, letting my own regrets swirl around in my head with Kanye’s.

But it’s good to listen to it now and hear the highlights I was too depressed to fully appreciate at the time, like the soaring and soulful “The Glory,” and the summertime jam “The Good Life.” I love it because it’s a record that has something for you whatever your mood is when you’re listening to it. It’s a rare album that can oscillate back and forth between unbridled optimism and dark, paranoid regret, and make it seem natural.

5. The Streets – A Grand Don’t Come For Free

An epic concept-album that starts with a dvd not being returned on time and ends with a pair of jeans being washed in too-warm water that’s rapped by some white British dude. I can understand people’s initial reluctance to take this album, or the entire concept of rap being done by people with British accents, for that matter, seriously. But they should, because while there are lots of jokes on this record, the music itself is as serious and earnest as can be. “Could Well Be In” completely captures through stream-of-consciousness the thoughts of someone’s inner debate over how he’s doing while trying to woo a girl. “It Was Supposed To Be So Easy” and “Fit But You Know It” have excellent hooks, but the lyrics are really what make them work. One of my old co-op mates swore that “Blinded By The Lights” was exactly what doing ecstasy felt like. But the best comes last. In “Empty Cans,” Mike Skinner goes through two scenarios, one in which he chooses to be pissed off at the world, and one where he decides to move on. It rewards repeated listens, which are required to parse the subtle musical differences between scenarios, and the wordplay between the two. It’s a happy ending, but again not Hollywood; it doesn’t end when the guy gets the girl, but when he realizes he’s responsible for his own happiness, and can’t lean on anyone else for that: “No one’s really there fighting for you in the last garrison; no one except yourself, that is, no one except you; you are the one who’s got your back ‘til the last deed’s done.” It’s empowering, and good to remember in hard times.

4. Albert Alexander – College

Are there other albums that even try to capture the tumult of emotions and experiences involved with one’s first year of college? I don’t think there are, and if there were, they’d all fall short of Albert’s first recorded collection of songs. There’s no way you could better express the strange mix of real and manufactured nostalgia for home produced by moving thousands of miles away than “Texas,” or better articulate the arc of aching for Friday classes to be over to get to a night of partying that’s followed by a morning of mixed emotions and regrets than “Dead Weekends,” or sum up the conflict involved in trying to keep parts of your childhood while watching yourself and everything around you change than “Freshman,” or the giddiness that comes from finding someone you think against your own best judgment might be one to stay with than “Short Stories,” or how crestfallen you feel seeing that person walk away in another guy’s arms than “Date Auction,” or express sonically the freedom you feel when the year is finally over than in “Finals.”

Now that I’ve lauded just about every song on the album, let me say that it’s one that’s short, but for that without filler, and whether he knew it or not, one that mimics in its brevity how compressed that year of my life now feels in my mind (and I imagine in the minds of other people who’ve graduated and been out in the real world for a few years). It’s an album that’s full of earnest energy, and manages to broach serious topics without taking itself too seriously. It’s another that came out in the dark fall of my student teaching year, that I will always appreciate and remember for helping convince me to continue living through it, hoping and half-knowing that one day I would get to that place the narrator in “Finals” is talking about where I’d “take what (I’d) earned: some time off from thinking about what keeps me up at night; well I guess we’re gonna do all right!”

3. Girl Talk – Feed The Animals

Summer album of the decade, thy name is Feed The Animals. I used to listen to this album two or three times a day the summer I volunteered for the Obama campaign, once on my way down to Jackson from Lansing, usually once while driving around Jackson registering voters and promoting Obama, and then once more on my way back to my co-op in Lansing before rinsing and repeating the next day. The only time I ever spontaneously made out with a stranger was at a Girl Talk show in Baltimore during a slightly remixed “Play Your Part, part II.” Everyone who listens to it with me finds something to laugh at, or be horrified by, or that they recognize for its ubiquity. Hipsters love the mash-up of Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” with Jay-Z’s “Roc Boys;” poptimists can appreciate Cat Power’s bouncy piano line from the Apple Airbook (or whatever it’s called) commercials being used as the beat for Eminem to rap over; girls tend to point out the Britney Spears, Beach Boys, and Avril Lavigne samples; metalheads love the Metallica/’Lil Mama mash-up; anyone can appreciate the silliness of the chorus from “Jesse’s Girl” being mashed with a deep-throated rapper to say “I wish that I had Jesse’s Girl/But I’d rather get some head” over and over again. I for one love the pacing, and how while it’s not at all a traditional album, it insists on using repeated imagery to make the first song and last song feel linked, beginning and ending with Andre 3000’s voice. It’s a complete album, with peaks and valleys of energy, and a gradual crescendo followed by an anthemic Journey song to end it.

2. The Age of Reason – A Night With Mickey’s

The band that was born from the ashes of Part Time, and threw gasoline on the fire that was already burning on and threatening to sink the good ship Gorilla Smith, to mix my metaphors quite badly, created this album the summer after my freshman year in college. And it was so much better than anything anyone from the Livonia scene had done previously (or has done since, for that matter). Songs like the title track deserved to be hits on alternative radio; a million teenage rebels should have looked forward to screaming “TWO MONTHS ‘TIL I’LL BE GONE!” before hurling themselves into mosh pits at TAOR shows; thousands of closet romantics should have mistaken the words in “Hear What I’m Screaming” for being about a girl, instead of about Steve Reynolds joining the army after the infamous intra-family fistfight that inspired “A Night With Mickey’s.” In a perfect world, maybe. As it was, it kept a permanent position in the cd case in my car, in case I ever needed to scream along after getting into a fight with an ex-girlfriend, or arguing with my parents, or just wanted something familiar and upbeat that I knew by heart to drive along the highway with late at night to keep me awake. It was perhaps my most listened to album of the decade, looking at the raw numbers just on my computer now, and thinking about the hundreds of plays that were lost when my older computers bit the dust, and the hundreds of untold times I listened to it in my car, and all the times I saw the songs live, which was absolutely any time I could. Like Wilco said, it’s “So good you won’t ever know; you can’t hear it on the radio…”

1. The Mountain Goats – The Sunset Tree

Honesty doesn’t get much more brutal than on this album. It’s dark, and full of sharp objects, poisons and pain. But its response to these things is not to mope about them and be all emo, but rather to respond with hope. To live for a magical weekend escape to “a girl named Cathy” who “wants a little of my time,” and “playing videogames in a drunken haze.” To dance to dance music even as drinking glasses are hurled through the air at the loved ones around you. To escape into the dream chamber afforded by headphones before being strangled by a too-real monster. To know that “Some things you do for money, and some you do for fun, but the things you do for love are gonna come back to you one by one.” I learned how to play “This Year” on guitar after I got back from Ecuador, and from then on played it anytime I came up against a situation I was determined to make it through, if it killed me, from that lonely summer/fall, to my dark internship year at Everett, to my first real year of teaching in Baltimore. I had the album on while I packed my things up in my bedroom in my host family’s house in Quito, getting ready to go to the airport in the morning to head back to Michigan, and when “Pale Green Things” came on. I welled up, and collapsed on the floor, and could barely breathe I was crying so hard at the feeling of loss I had, knowing I would never be the same person in that same position ever again, and that my chance to see things and talk to people there was about to be over. It's an album about getting through things, and looking forward to the day that things will be over, and being confused and kind of sad when things finally do end. I spent a lot of my decade in one of these three states. Here's hoping my next one will be a little more even, and a little bit happier.