And a big welcome everyone to probably my largest personal indulgence of the countdown.
No, this wasn't on any other lists, Smog wasn'y on many full stop. Both situations are wrong. This album is possibly my favourite of the decade. Smog/Bill Callahan (although somehow the eponymous releases were kind of B grade) would have to vie for the title of its greatest singer-songwriter.
If readers have been following at all, they'll have already discerned that this particular commentator values above all else sell-crafted simplicity and poecy in songwriting above almost all else. And this simply excelled at both to an extent in my musical pantheon that this was always going top five.
It's just a beautiful song, but it's little more than a two chord arpeggio. It is however perfectly married to a lyric strong enough to virtually carry the song itself. Callahan's incredible bass emotes to the exactingly calibrated level he's perfected, hovering perpetually between irony and pathos. And some weight it hefts around.
"With the grace of a corpse in a riptide/I let go/and I slide, slide, slide/downriver"
But it's the repeating sections "There is no love ..." and most particularly the "Bury me in wood" 'crescendo' that concludes the song that render it truly memorable. These can scarcely be done justice in printed reproduction. But it's this section in particular which really earns this song it's spot amongst the decade's mightiest.
But if anyone's ever written a better pop lyrics than "bury me in fire/and I'm gonna phoenix", I'm keen to know what it is.
Because that's just one of the most perfect twenty seconds of songwriting you'll ever hear.
There was some Christian weirdo in the US running round prime time TV saying this was the most evil song ever written for a while. With a zealot's usual sophistication, we were treated to the censor's natural desire to look at uncomfortable works of art, and completely ignore all the discomfort. Anything an artist depicts, the artist wholeheartedly supports. Which is why Shakespeare is an antisemite for killing off Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.
Ergh. Anyway, yes it's about rape and abusive relationships, it's also in no way uncritical, and is art at its uneasy best.
69.
Lived In Bars - Cat Power
The Greatest (2006)
Well she certainly has. In fact, few contemporary performers have done the Keith Richards act so wholeheartedly. Once famous for her train wreck shows as she slid into alcoholism, it's this sublime album that probably rescued her career, if not her life. And of course, this the centerpiece is impossible to read outside of those battles. She was sober for three days recording the album, but was unable initially to tour in support of it, going through various stages of hospitalisation, what must have at one point seemed like a terminal millstone has been turned into resurrection. The new Cat Power who plays entire shows, doesn't abuse her audience or begin talking to squirrels mid-song is a mighty thing to behold.
68.
99 Problems - Jay-Z
Hot Joints 2 (2004)
Little introduction required here. A true hip-hop monster track, you were hard pressed to spend a night on the town on any scene mid-decade and manage to avoid this thundering forth at some point in the evening.
67.
We Have A Map Of The Piano - Múm
Finally We Are No One (2002)
Well the Icelanders certainly had an interesting decade or so. But this was fully six years before the GFC. This nation has always punched above its per capita weight musically (what the hell else is there to do in three months of perpetual darkness but play music?), and this band have long been somewhere near the forefront of that scene.
It's a little bit indietronica, somewhere roundabouts understated post-rock, but listen CAREFULLY ... there's also elements of GLITCH in there, but the minimal vocals take it somewhere quite unique just outside of ALL those genres.
66.
Out Of Time - Blur
Think Tank (2003)
There are a few acts to come who all seem to sit outside their own element in this list. Properly NINETIES acts whose careers burst the boundaries of the decade. Most of them are twilight offerings, final last hurrahs. Some, like The Cure's were intended as such, and work well. Others, like this one see Blur still sounding vital, still with something to say.
In fact, Think Tank charted an interesting direction for how Blur might have gone into their dotage, an interesting multi-layered, swirling largely atmospheric direction, but always as here grounded in Damon's ability to write an arresting melody which manages to sound both unrefined AND original.
65.
Rock Bottom Riser - Smog
A River Ain't Too Much To Love (2005)
Ah Smog. A supreme pleasure live if you ever get the chance.
Nobody has the essentials of songwriting more down pat. Simple, almost naive yet still eloquent, underwhelming vignettes are the lyrical and musical building blocks, and the architecture is rarely short of sublime.
64.
Silver Screen - Shower Scene - Felix Da Housecat
Club Rotation Vol.16 (2001)
Seeing house acts live is generally a hit and miss experience. And I did catch Felix doing his thing off Glenferrie Rd at some indeterminant point during the decade.
And I remember basically standing round with a bunch of people who could have been listening to anyone spinning anything for all they seemed to actually engage. Until he played this. And the joint went crazy for ONE SONG. During which my recollection is we pretty much got the radio rotation single version. And I could have stood there and done that for twenty bucks a head, thankyou very much. And this is why I no longer pay to see dance acts.
Nonethelesss, this is a CRACKING single. The bassline/rhythm flips repeatedly from stomping kickdrum to driven semi-industrial before you properly have time to orient yourself, and it's that tension that creates the entire edifice.
63.
Don't Call Me Red - Ry Cooder
Chávez Ravine (2005)
For this reviewer, this was one of the decade's standout albums. On certain days, I'm happy to declare it the BEST ALBUM OF THE DECADE. It is irrespective a hugely important HISTORICAL document, and that in itself about warrants inclusion. Who else is sick to death of music and musicians that have no sense of history?
Chávez Ravine was a concept album telling the story of the eponymous former LA suburb, home to a large Mexican-American housing community, expelled from their homes in order to build a social housing project that never eventuated. Eventually the LA Dodgers built a stadium on the site. Cooder mixes traditional songs in with his own original work, to create one of the decade's most towering, mighty, self-contained and self-worthy albums. It oozes leftist politics without a even hint of the tokenism or bombast we're used to when scruffy musos get political, and this track is probably most exemplary.
62.
Pop Crimes - Rowland S. Howard
Pop Crimes (2009)
RIP, you great junkie misanthrope. He lived downstairs from my mate's place in East St. Kilda. Kept entirely to himself, didn't want to communicate with you. And that was just fine too, because I've learned that knowing your idols too well is so often a mistake.
His final album was probably his finest moment, and arguably the best Australian release for the decade. A guitarist's guitarist, but a grounded one. My favourite interview with Rowland has him speaking with barely disguised contempt for fellow guitarists who turn up to gigs with racks crammed full of showy guitars "usually in inverse proportion to their ability to actually play them". Rowland had ONE guitar - a 60s original Fender Jaguar, from which he could wring sounds I've not met ANY living being capable of properly replicating. But more from Rowland in a bit ...
61.
Destroy Everything You Touch - Ladytron
Witching Hour (2005)
I never actually knew much about this band, so researching this has been interesting. They do know how to write an absolutely killer single. This is a tad rockier than their standard fare, which sits a little more at the ethereal end of the spectrum, a little bit elelctro, a little bit shoegazey at times, they're also extremely accomplished remix artists.
This is easily their best work, this song just about pummels you all but to death.
You don't really start from anywhere meaningful to say in terms of earth shattering events of the decade, the one that shattered the Twin Towers of New York City and with it so many lives is inescapably the defining one for the entire globe.
Across vastly different cultures and regions, the impact of these events came to define the decade for so many - arguably any culture with any significant access to media to an extent that has certainly been rare in human history.
Do we see this new zeitgeist reflected in the music of the age? This is one issue we will ponder.
On a musical level, I have a few theses to extend progressively here.
My main one is that the decade really saw the end of all things monolithic in rock in particular, maybe pop and rap less so. Who are the big stadium acts now? They're all guys, and I do mean guys, from the 80s or earlier doing reunions.
It seems like Blur v Oasis are the last meaningful monoliths we are ever to see if there's any trend to be evinced from the handing of these sorts of titles to Snoop Dogg, Beyonce, Rihannon, J Lo, Gaga, etc. The thing that unites them is a large-scale vacuousness, a sense that all these beings are mannequins to more or less overt extents.
They're brands built by marketing, they themselves are just sites for discourse, billboards. So much so that even though they are at one level all about MEEEE as a global marketing force, the actual 'self', the sense of all this being about a real, living person rather than someone who descends daily from Mount Olympus, is entirely lost.
And technology pushes us ever more into this ever more self-enabled, atomised world. And we, and young folk in particular spin a very positive narrative about these discourses of narrative and freedom.
Yet at the same time we feel betrayed and jaded with what we see as outmoded structures in government and in the broader political/social sphere, we claim to crave a better sense of engagement with an ideal something in so many areas of our lives. Yet we're getting torn apart by the atomisation discourse on the one hand and the communitarian on the other.
In musical terms, file sharing and related technologies have impacted an entire artistic discourse. The self-proliferation and DIY ethos has much in common with punk. But at the level upon which distribution is still reliant upon industry models we have seen considerably less investment in new artists and innovation than at any time probably since the dawn of rock itself.
It must be pointed out, this survey doesn't bear that lack of innovation out. It shows that artists are always going to find a way to make great music. But the look of the whole 'scene' is very different to how it the 90s would have appeared looking back from 2005.
In this list, we see a profusion of artists and styles pointing off in a million directions, where in the 90s we'd be stoking the chart with Britpop and Madchaster or derivatives thereof. Subcultural forms were either established and survived and evolved within themselves.
In the case of rave, it started out as a wildly innovative and deeply counter-cultural movement, but it was soon coopted by the entire corporate superDJ/superclub/superfestvial scene with such depressing speed and completeness, this has to be one of the key stories of the 90s.
That decade started with the promise of a 'Peace Dividend' from the Cold War, but was bookend by the events of September 11, 2001 that led the US at least into a War that accrued public debt at such a rate that government couldn't drag the US economy out of recession, giving us ten years of stagnant growth.
So, this isn't the nineties, but it's obviously an extension of it. Why should an arbitrary point in time affect any of this anyway?
Technologies that enhanced social atomisation and individualism were already well advanced, even if we didn't have social media yet. Probably the other great universal global trend to emerge this decade.
More on this. And specifically on how everything has impacted music later this week.
#
Name
Artist
Album (Year)
249
Womanizer
Britney Spears
The Singles Collection (2008)
248
Down Down Down
The Presets
Beams (2005)
247
Living With War
Neil Young
Living With War (2006)
246
Departures
Closer Musik
Kompakt Total 3 (2010)
245
The Lisbon Maru
Fuck Buttons
Tarot Sport (2000)
244
Incinerate
Sonic Youth
Prime Cuts (Promo) (2006)
243
Fingers Become Thumbs!
Future Of The Left
Curses (2007)
242
Club Foot
Kasabian
Kasabian Empire ()
241
Epoca
Gotan Project
La Revercha Del Tango (2001)
240
Little Rhymes
Mercury Rev
All Is Dream [Bonus Track] (2001)
239
Running The Loping
Smog
A River Ain't Too Much To Love (2005)
238
Hate To Say I Told You So
The Hives
Tyrannosaurus Hives (2000)
237
Bewitching Cattle
Moon Wiring Club
Shoes Off And Chairs Away (2009)
236
The Empty Page
Sonic Youth
(2002)
235
Death to Death
The Crucified
Take Up Your Cross/Nailed (2008)
234
Inside Outside
The Grates
Gravity Won't Get You High (2006)
233
You And Me
Her Space Holiday
The Past Presents the Future (2005)
232
Halcyon
(Beautiful Days)
Mono
Walking Cloud And Deep Red Sky, Flag Fluttered And The Sun Shined (2004)
