Albums of the Decade: 2000-2009 - #40-31

#40

Chutes Too Narrow
The Shins
2003

Why am I souring on The Shins?  Backlash?  Not aging well?  Halfway through the decade, this would have been a Top-10 album on my list.  Even a couple of years ago, I think this cracks the Top-20.  It's phenomenal, and marks their high point (so far) in their discography.  It's full of poppy-goodness, as I like to call it.  Maybe if it were Spring, rather than Winter, I'd be singing a different tune.  This music isn't the kind of thing for a day where they are calling for snow (Bon Iver, where you at?).  Kissing the Lipless is such a great tune, and So Says I...they are pretty damn close to the best pure pop songs of the entire decade.  I'd argue these guys made Sub Pop more money than any other artist this decade...and it was a REAL good decade for that label.

#39

The Boxer
The National
2007

This one, for me, was a slow burn.  I liked it when it came out, but not to the level that everyone was screaming about it.  I think I really turned the corner on this one just a few months ago, when I spun it on the record player on a lazy night, and drank a cold one.  I'm still left wondering; what is The National?  They are one of those genre defying bands.  Possessing one of the most unique voices in the industry helps.  He's like a cross between an indie rock front man and a crooner from the 50/60s.  It's a strange dynamic, but it works.  Listen to Fake Empire, one of the best political tracks of the decade, and you'll see what I mean.  Or my personal fave, Start a War, with it's poetic repetition and simple guitar line.  I've commented that these guys have the potential to be the biggest band in the world.  They seem to have the drive, the connections, and the talent.

#38

Everything All The Time
Band of Horses
2006

More Sub Pop...they litter the Top-40 on my list.  Is this where the 'folk' thing really coalesced?  Borrowing from the best of Iron & Wine and My Morning Jacket, and doing it before Fleet Foxes, and all the freak folkers that have come about in the last few years cut their teeth.  I'm probably ignoring a huge swath of great bands who were more 'vital' or 'relevant', but Band of Horses crafted their own niche with this record, and are due a ton of credit for the shift in indie rock sound over the last three or four years.  They have an ability to pull the most epic sound out, just by slowing things down a little bit more.  There is tons of space, especially in their drumming (listen to the restraint in The Great Salt Lake, for instance).  The First Song is totally a 70's homage, but somehow it's fresh and new.  Like everything else that is good, it's filtered through a hefty dose of Neil Young.  Few songs can match the soft/loud of The Funeral, though, which just fucking explodes through the chorus.  Just plain epic.

#37

Hospice
Antlers
2009

Guy locks himself in his apartment and cuts an album about coping with the death of his loved one.  It's got a back story that Pitchfork compared to Bon Iver, but aside from the isolation of the creative process, and the self-released buzz that they generated, they are vastly different.  This album is lush...almost grandiose, at times.  The production values are extremely high...there are moments where you're left speechless at the layered wall of sound blasting your eardrums.  I'm left wondering how one person could basically pull this off.  This album hurts.  It literally hurts.  The lyrics aren't to be listened to in great detail if you're inclined to melancholy, or if you rely on prescription drugs to stabilize you.  You'd probably curse the world and pull the covers up for a month.  But that's death, and like it or not, it's real. 

#36

Our Endless Numbered Days
Iron & Wine
2004

Iron & Wine's first real 'studio' effort didn't really change the formula much from the first, and I think a lot of these songs were written during the same period as those that appeared on the debut.  It's quiet, twirling, and folkish.  Sam Beam crafts incredible imagery, thanks I think to his background in film.  He understands how to frame a story.  He understands how to use metaphors to simplify a theme.  Hauntingly beautiful lyrics like the chorus in Naked As We Came just can't be beat: One of us will die inside these arms/Eyes wide open, naked as we came/One will spread our ashes round the yard

There's something visceral about Beam's poetry.  His songs bring emotion.  They remind you of things that you forgot about a long time ago.  He is perhaps the most effective songwriter of our generation, and I say that with as little hyperbole as I can muster.  His songs almost always elicit an emotion.  In his early material, like this album, the simple song structures, and the tinkling chord progressions...they lend more to the intimacy.  It's bigger than coffee shop folk, though.  It's not Starbucks or M&M's or whatever else they are able to flog on the backs of this sound.  It's songs like Sodom, South Georgia, which I've shed more tears to than maybe anything else in my life, and which this week has been highly relevant (almost to the point where I might have to retire it for a while). 

Papa died smiling
Wide as the ring of a bell
Gone all star white
Small as a wish in a well
And Sodom, South Georgia
Woke like a tree full of bees
Buried in Christmas
Bows and a blanket of weeds

Papa died Sunday and I understood
All dead white boys say, "God is good"
White tongues hang out, "God is good"

Papa died while my
Girl Lady Edith was born
Both heads fell like
Eyes on a crack in the door
And Sodom, South Georgia
Slept on an acre of bones
Slept through Christmas
Slept like a bucket of snow

Papa died Sunday and I understood
All dead white boys say, "God is good"
White tongues hang out, "God is good"

It's just a circle of life song...almost cliche, in the vein of something Elton John does for Disney movies.  Those metaphors, though, are untouchable.  To hear that one live these days is a whole new experience than the hushed version on the album.  He's transformed it into an almost triumphant extravaganza, framing it around the celebration of life, rather than the sadness of the passing.  To say that's not relevant to my shit this week is an understatement.  And that's one of the reasons we use music to heal, and the best case for a sad song that I can possibly make.  It's how we cope, how we move on.

#35

Sky Blue Sky
Wilco
2007

I call this one 'Ghost is Born Pt 2'...partially because I like to get on the nerves of my buds, but also a little bit because it feels like an extension of that great album...but it just didn't grow enough to soar past it.  I'll admit, this one has really grown on me, to the point where I'm almost ready to consider it a classic.  It would be indispensable in their catalog.  The newest album is not enjoying this slow burn effect, which makes me wonder if perhaps they were inching down the 'Adult Contemporary' road in here (listen to the beginning of You Are My Face, before the Nels Cline freakout happens).  Wilco is aging like those kids that came on Geraldo back in the day, that had the disease where they looked 95, but were really 12.  Hell, Nels Cline can nearly draw Social Security (and so can Tweedy's wife).  Tweedy looks like death in a lot of pictures I've seen him recently.  In this incarnation of Wilco, they are best when they let Cline freak the fuck out, and he does so plenty on this record.  He's a virtuoso, on par with those assholes in Chickenfoot, or whatever other Steve Vai bullshit you want to shove down my throat.  I would think that Cline could destroy EVH in an MC Hammer/Michael Jackson style play-off.  With Wilco, you're either with me or against me.  I say get on board, and enjoy the ride.

#34

Easy Tiger
Ryan Adams
2007

Chuck Klosterman's 'Highly Advanced' theory really applies to this album.  When it came out, critics jumped at the chance to pan it.  It wasn't whatever they were looking for, which at this point for Adams, could very well be anything.  With expectations so wide, everyone missed the fact that Adams had really nailed this one.  It was SO easy to point towards Halloweenhead, a proto-Highly Suspicious if there ever was one, and say 'WHAT THE FUCK IS THIS SHIT'.  That would mean you missed out on the beautiful mountain song Pearls on a String or Tears of Gold, which was very much in tune with all the material that he purged in 2005, or These Girls, which has seen many different versions over the years, but few better than this simple version.  Then there are the two masterpieces on this one.  Oh My God, Whatever, Etc. and I Taught Myself How to Grow Old are, quite simply, ungodly works of music.  It's an album that kept getting better with each listen.  Hell, I don't even skip Halloweenhead, anymore.

#33

Furnace Room Lullaby
Neko Case
2000

I like my Neko best served a little country, and her stuff back when her backing band was the 'Boyfriends' is my favorite (though there really isn't a bad Neko Case record).  Her voice kicks in on that opening track, and bam, I'm entranced.  Thrice All-American (Tacoma) is such an important look into the small town America, especially in today's terms, where it seems that sprawl and loss of manufacturing jobs are killing what was best about being rural.  Her phrasing of the lyric 'dusty old jewel in the South Puget Sound', and the dig on Wal Mart at the end really sell that one as a classic song.  It does get pretty fucking country at times.  Whip the Blankets would get you going at the ho-down, for sure.  It's a perfect balance, though, of country jangle and slow ballads.  Hard to believe this one is 10 years old!

#32

I And Love And You
Avett Brothers
2009

What happens when you take some good ol' boys from Eastern NC, known for mixing mountain folk with a younger aesthetic, and throw them in Southern California with Rick Rubin behind the knobs?  Fucking magic, that's what.  This one hasn't been out too long, but it's made a huge impression on me.  It's so earnest and unpretentious.  I don't quite know what to make of it.  If you're ignorant to the background, you wouldn't peg this for a folk-y type album, and they really don't throw down any mountain sound, except for one outro.  My wife, when asked, likened these guys more to Ben Folds.  There's a lot of piano, a lot of layered harmonies on the vocals, and a lot of earnest pop.  I don't know if I've heard a song as unpretentious as January Wedding since the Mamas and the Papas or something like that.  But everything isn't all lovey dovey.  The title track, for instance, has a heavy final refrain:

Dumbed down and numbed by time and age
Your dreams to catch the world, the cage
The highway sets the travelers stage
All exits look the same

Three words that became hard to say
I and love and you
I and love and you
I and love and you

Sky's the limit for these guys.  

#31

Live
Built to Spill
2000

I have no idea how they did it, but they took Neil Young's Cortez the Killer and made it BETTER.  How is that possible?  I mean, this is Neil Young, for god's sake.  He owns that song.  It's in his wheelhouse.  How could this happen?  I have no idea...in a world where live covers are cliche, Built to Spill somehow took one of the best live songs of All Time, and improved on it.  It's a 20 minute long mindfuck.  It catapults this album, which is full of great, great material (including another epic jam to close things out) far above the rest of their catalog.  This cover is so full of win, if you haven't downloaded it and started the mp3 yet, cranking those shitty PC speakers up to as far as they will go, then you are a pinko-commie, and I don't want anything to do with you.

Click HERE to go to #30-21
Click HERE to go back to the Album of the Decade main page
Click HERE to go back to #50-41