Fast forward to the dawn of the second decade of the millennium, and we see that, while the single has experienced a rebirth as a vital part of a musician’s livelihood in the era of the 99 cent track, the album is far from dead.
The following are my picks for top 20 album releases of the past decade. But first, a few ground rules:
- Only one album per artist. So, even though Wilco released four stellar albums over the past decade, I’ve forced myself to choose a favorite.
- This list is based solely on music I have in my collection. So, it’s missing some great albums that I’ve heard and enjoyed, but don’t actually own in their entirety for whatever reason (TV on the Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain, for one).
- No greatest hits discs, soundtrack or compilation albums, b-sides and rarities collections, etc. Even though Tom Waits’ Orphans contained some great stuff, and Neil Young’s Anthology Vol. 1 is now the gold standard for all hits and rarities collections, I decided to look only at albums full of new material by single artists, the contents of which could reasonably be absorbed by a listener in one sitting.
- This is my list, and reflects my personal musical tastes. Don’t ask me why Norah Jones, Coldplay or Nickelback aren’t represented here even though they sold zillions of CDs and took home boatloads of awards, because you’re probably not going to like my answer if you’re a fan of these acts.
- Finally, and further to the above, I’ve restricted myself to looking only at albums released over the past decade that I still enjoy listening to today as much as I did when they were initially released. This rules out stuff by Franz Ferdinand, Kings of Leon, OutKast and other bands whose albums enjoyed brief moments of glory in my CD collection but are now largely collecting dust or get the occasional listen for nostalgic reasons.
20) Feist, Let it Die
Leslie Feist, it must be said, recorded her masterpiece several years before she began helping Apple sell iPods. With Let it Die, Feist created a disc of gorgeous pop tunes, including covers from popular artists The Bee Gees and Ron Sexmith that stand up admirably to the originals. More importantly, it showcased the charisma that would help catapult Feist into international stardom, and reminded anyone who might have forgotten that women do indeed matter in the often male-dominated world of modern rock music.
19) Once: Music from the Motion Picture
You might be looking at this, and then looking back up at my rules which state “no soundtracks,” and thinking to yourself, “that hypocritical SOB!” Yes, this one is a movie soundtrack. But more importantly, it’s not a movie soundtrack. Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova were cast in the movie Once as musicians falling in love. As the two real-life musicians set about writing and recording the songs that would feature in the movie, while also acting in said film, they began a real-life relationship. The awkward, vulnerable chemistry between the two is present in both the movie and these songs.
18) Wolf Parade, Apologies to the Queen Mary
Selecting Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock to produce this debut full-length was a stroke of genius and a fitting match, considering both bands’ ability to create quirky pop-rock hooks. Brock’s influence shows all over these songs, and if anything, he produced an album that possibly exceeds anything done with his own band.
17) Loretta Lynn, Van Lear Rose
Loretta Lynn’s 37th album came at a point when the 69-year-old was largely being ignored by Nashville. But this 2004 partnership with Jack White of the White Stripes, who produced the album as well as playing on some of the tracks, saw Lynn tread new and exciting musical ground while finding an audience with younger listeners. It also marked only the second time in her recording career where she wrote or co-wrote all the tracks on an album. If Lynn doesn’t release another album (and she hasn’t to date), this would mark an outstanding bookend to a storied recording career.
16) Green Day, American Idiot
Best album by a band whose 10 minutes of fame was supposed to be long since over. After breaking out with 1994’s Dookie, Green Day could have put together maybe one great album’s worth of material from the stuff they released on their next three albums. Not only did this album reinforce the notion that Green Day can make great punk music, but it also showed they were capable of making great music that didn’t necessarily fit into a narrow category.
15) U2, All That You Can’t Leave Behind
By the end of the 1990s, when the only creativity they could muster in the seven years between Zooropa and this disc was the spotty Pop, I really thought these guys might be done. The huge stadium tours and Bono’s over-the-top, look-at-me actions went from interesting to annoying quickly once it became clear that they no longer had the musical chops to back it all up. Then this came out, and everything changed. While it certainly wasn’t the second coming of The Joshua Tree that so many reviews made it out to be, this album definitely saw U2 return to the heartfelt, meaningful lyrics and cohesive and interesting song structures that marked that great release.
14) The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots
The Flaming Lips have enjoyed a small but dedicated fan base, who have followed them throughout their diverse, two-decade recording history. For those of us on the outside of that fan base, who appreciated the trips but could never quite get behind the journey, this release was a revelation. A quasi-concept album full of references to space, science-fiction and robots, with ethereal electronic noises to match, Yoshimi was the first Lips album to take the stuff going on in singer Wayne Coyne’s head and translate it so a wide audience could understand and appreciate it.
13) Fleet Foxes, Fleet Foxes
The 1960s came back full force in the 2000s, in clothing, design, furniture, etc. But one of the most interesting, and long-overdue 1960s comebacks was seen in music, from the fuzzed-out garage punk of The White Stripes and The Strokes to the folk-pop revival seen in bands such as the Shins and the Fleet Foxes. The Foxes’ self-titled debut effortlessly combines folk phrasings and multi-part vocal harmonies to create something that gets into your head just as easily as it can fade into the background.
12) TV on the Radio, Dear Science
This album took the unique sounds and bits of promise that weaved through their previous disc, Return to Cookie Mountain, and managed to harness them for an entire album’s worth of material. It also saw TV on the Radio achieve what Beck largely failed to do on his Midnight Vultures: blend influences including Prince, Curtis Mayfield and the Talking Heads and create an album that sounded like each of those acts reinvented for a 21st-century audience.
11) The Strokes, Is This It
With all due respect to bands like The New Pornographers, Modest Mouse and Sigur Ros, whose Y2K releases were already beginning to define the 00s sonically, Is This It was the first release of the decade that made people from all stripes and all musical tastes sit up and take notice. The ability of Julian Casablancas and co. to create a sound that was at once theirs and also transported the listener to another time and another place (the dirty, sleazy and musically vital New York City of 1977, in this case), was a feat often repeated, though seldom equalled, by other bands over the past 10 years.
10) Radiohead, Kid A
At some point between 1995’s The Bends and this release, Thom Yorke clearly got tired of being in a traditional rock band. You can hear the band’s first attempts to create a new sound on 1997’s brilliant OK Computer, and they took the experimentation a thousand steps further with this disc. Equal parts heavy, introspective, beautiful and challenging, Kid A clearly demonstrated that the Radiohead of old was dead. Pity, though, that nothing the band has released since this album has retained the same fresh, thoroughly listenable vibe.
9) The Hold Steady, Boys and Girls in America
“Boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk—real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”
So opines Sal Paradise, narrator of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road. This quote formed the title, and lyrical direction of this album. Songs focused on the trials and tribulations of slacker kids who spend their days doing drugs and having sex. For many of us, this disc put to bed the long-held belief that concept albums—aside from maybe The Wall—generally suck, and/or are based entirely around deep space/middle earth/rock operas/prog music.
8) The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow
The idea of a mega-star of the cinema announcing, in a movie directed by a mega-star of the TV world, that a band will ‘change your life’ should constitute a nauseating scenario for any serious music fan. But when that band is The Shins, and that song is taken from an album like Chutes Too Narrow, that pronouncement can’t be too far from the truth. And while that flick paved the way for a string of so-called ‘quirky’ movies starring so-called ‘quirky’ actors such as Michael Cera and Ellen Page, and the Shins haven’t made a great album in more than six years, this album will forever stand as a testament that sometimes even Hollywood tells the truth.
7) Badly Drawn Boy, The Hour of Bewilderbeast
When Damon Gough, a.k.a. Badly Drawn Boy, came seemingly out of nowhere and won Britain’s Mercury Prize (like Canada’s Polaris Prize, if the Polaris actually mattered) with this album, it was like the second coming of… well, something cool. The Hour of Bewilderbeast arguably kicked the singer-songwriter trend of the 2000s into gear. But while others of his ilk have tended toward simple guitar-driven melodies to get their point across, Gough combined his six-string with layers of electronic sounds, strings and horns. Unfortunately, Gough has since turned to more mainstream production and promptly disappeared from relevance, clear evidence of how quickly the industry will eat its babies if they fall out of line.
6) The Dears, Gang of Losers
Yes, lead singer Murray Lightburn sounds a lot like Morrissey. But whereas the lack of focus on the band’s previous releases often made this comparison stand out more prominently than the music itself, The Dears manage to rein in the Brit-pop and orchestral synth that sprawled across their previous releases and create an album’s worth of tight, interesting songs—grand and orchestral where need be, quiet and introspective elsewhere.
5) Arcade Fire, Funeral
Death has never sounded so beautiful. Various members of Montreal’s Arcade Fire were in the throes of personal losses at the time of recording this album, and that sadness and vulnerability comes through in the music. Songs about society in decline paint a picture of despair, but the immediateness and intensity of the music, and tunes such as “Wake Up” (If the children don’t grow up/our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up/We’re just a million little gods causing rain storms/turnin’ every good thing to rust) urge the listener to do whatever it takes to move forward and survive.
4) Okkervil River, The Stage Names
This 2007 album was the unofficial soundtrack to the time I spent falling in love with the woman who is now my wife, and I experienced the album like one might experience real love. I discovered it purely by accident, downloading it on a whim one day. And I still remember the feeling I was left with as I listened to it on my iPod constantly for weeks on end, Will Sheff’s vocals and the bands hooks burrowing into my subconscious until I couldn’t imagine a world without this album.
3) Spoon, Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Selecting one Spoon release for this list was a particularly difficult task, not only because most of their albums have come out in the 00s, but Spoon is also not a band to rest on their laurels. Like the best bands in rock history, all of Spoon’s releases seem to adopt their own sound. But Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga managed to take the best of all the vibes, moods and influences that made up their previous albums and combined them into one ultimately outstanding effort.
2) The White Stripes, Elephant
Holy mother of god. That was the first thought that sprang to my mind halfway through my initial listen to this album, and it’s still the prevailing thought I have when listening to this today. How does a band made up of just two people—a vocalist/guitarist and a drummer—create something that sounds this angry, loud, raw and sonically satisfying? Of course, as the decade winds to a close and we’re able to look back on all the White Stripes and Raconteurs releases, we’ve begun to understand the simple answer to this question: Jack White is a musical genius.
1) Wilco, A Ghost is Born
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot was a brilliant album, so when Wilco managed to top it with this follow up, it was almost as if the entire musical universe had stopped turning for a minute. If Wilco never makes a better disc than this, they can still say they created one of the greatest rock albums of all time.