Ad Choices. –Jayson Greene, On Twin Cinema, Carl Newman and his band of moonlighting luminaries (including Neko Case and Destroyer’s Dan Bejar) build a film-studio lot’s worth of outlandish sets, and seek to discover that special something that keeps us returning to pop music. It’s a vulnerable yet confident record, and not just because she’s able to effortlessly incorporate contributions from grunge heavy hitters like Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder like it ain’t no thing. A certain old-timey feel prevails—there’s even a waltz, “Marla,” written 70-odd years ago by a late relative of singer Ed Droste—but the shadowy, dust-moted depth of the music moots its rootsiness. Even as “Homage” melts your face or “Baudelaire” boogies its way into your brain, you half-expect whatever’s next to fail. At some point the grandiosity should turn to bloat right? It’s glam for guys who wear off-the-rack Wranglers from Wal-Mart. Auto-Tune? In place of those virtues it offers a series of riotous peaks (Dolly! Getting used! –Eric Harvey, If the title of Lightning Bolt’s third LP seems redundant—aren’t all rainbows wonderful?—that’s probably intentional. It was her next album that she wryly called, that has the rights to that honor. So Lekman’s sweet, unposturing songs about first kisses, sublime haircuts, out-of-office replies, avocado-related mishaps, and asthma inhalers travel the Earth, using first-class samples when Lekman can’t fly somewhere himself (not even on the red prop plane from the video). It’s metal if the fans traded their pentagrams for smiley faces. But the giddy glam-rock stomp on which his words are delivered seems to say, “Yeah, but think of how cool that’ll look!” –Stuart Berman. Pitchfork's Top 200 Albums of the 2000s. Press play and the first sound you hear is a siren-like blare of an open E string announcing with all the subtlety of Funkmaster Flex that SHIT’S ABOUT TO GO DOWN. A case could certainly be made: the five-dollar words, the baroque instrumentation, the theater club sleeve art. Each Sunday, Pitchfork takes an in-depth look at a significant album from the past, and any record not in our archives is eligible. Our new-new-romantic overanxious urbanite narrator of the Dismemberment Plan—let’s call him Travis—seems to have got himself good and heartbroken sometime between 1999’s landmark art-funker Emergency & I and 2001’s Change, and, just like when it happens to you, it weighs on every moment. But the real magic of, lies in Carl Newman’s uncanny ability to craft a cohesive record without diluting the personalities at hand—note how Newman picks up a submissive falsetto to complement Case’s lead vocal in “Letter From an Occupant,” and how Bejar’s staggered phrasing is maintained even as “Breakin’ the Law” is transformed from hushed acoustic demo into fist-pumping album closer. an earnest, unfussy breakup record, sung loudly and without affect—it felt like a revelation, or, at the very least, a crack in the façade. And those miasmic ambient set pieces aren’t just there as breathers, but rather as emblems of a band that’s being perpetually melted down and reshaped from song to song. Lists can be great fun and great frustration, but … Skee-Lo! Music reviews, ratings, news and more. This is no one-night stand; it’s honeymoon fodder for saints. So “Use It” is a powder-keg of kinetic energy, while “The Bleeding Heart Show” (a song so awesome it made a University of Phoenix commercial seem transcendent) commemorates a missed gig with one of the most towering codas of the decade: Fuck playing for a cause—music is the only cause. –David Raposa, You wake up one morning, last’s night’s ill-advised champagne dump still slick against your brow, crumpled up invitation-to-everywhere next to the bed, and there’s this other person in there. Before Soulwax’s DJ alter egos, “eclectic” still tended to go hand in hand with “tasteful”—classic mixes like Coldcut’s 1995 Journeys By DJ ranged across a breakbeat genrescape but never lost a sense of discernment. –Paul Thompson, Listen: ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead: “Another Morning Stoner”, Anyone can play guitar. to Four Tet, Kanye West to Joanna Newsom—and the many sides of Radiohead, too—here are the albums who defined the decade. Music Quiz / Pitchfork's Best Albums of the 2000's Random Music or Album Quiz Can you name the Pitchfork's Best Albums of the 2000's? Those gestures, coupled with the growth of the group’s songwriting evident through, are as fitting a sendoff to Spoon’s salad days as one could hope. Taken all at once, Rubies is decadent, mapping a haute couture class system of well-off hipster intellectuals, idle painters, subcultural demigods, and of course, the beautiful women always just out of reach; Bejar further cuts his observations with tweedy references to Ezra Pound, Tchaikovsky, the Incredible String Band, and Greek mythology. Though total stylistic confluence may not have been his direct aim, Øye’s gauzy singing of wistful pop classics—“There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” “Always on My Mind,” “It’s a Fine Day,” etc.—over the day’s top tech-house tracks helped make international beats as palatable as ever. Pitchfork's 200 Best Albums of the 2000s - Page 2 show list info From M.I.A. But there’s an urgency and intimacy to, its heartbreak feels real, and uncontainable—that’s oddly timeless. People tend to belittle ambient techno as mere background music, but I say, fuck that, If Radiohead spent the turn of the millennium pondering the disassociating effects of technological over-dependency, the Super Furry Animals reveled in the absurdity of it. –Matthew Perpetua, Belle and Sebastian: “The Blues Are Still Blue”, The most-played song in my iTunes has no name: It’s “Untitled,” the opening track from Gas’. So along with the expertly delivered elegiac statements of self-importance like “December 4th” and “My 1st Song,” we had haughtily antisocial hardhead anthems like “PSA” and “Threat.”, Musically, The Black Album distills The Blueprint’s dusty widescreen soul into something harder, more simplistic, and more stadium-ready. The textural wash of Pop, the atmosphere Wolfgang Voigt built from his imagined Black Forest, isn’t an obvious choice but it always seems tailor-made for our lives. Alternative … to Four Tet, Kanye West to Joanna Newsom—and the many sides of Radiohead, too—here are the albums who defined the decade Pitchfork - There are many Paul McCartney albums, but only a precious few get to call themselves McCartney albums. –Joshua Love, From those early days when people thought his name was Rocky Dennis, Jens Lekman has cultivated an impression of complete sincerity at the same time he has remained as ultimately unknowable as Sally Shapiro; he’ll murmur sweet nothings too good to check, play at your neighbor’s house, then move to Australia and drop off the face of the internet. Leithauser, his warm rasp making him come across like a more emotionally unstable young Rod Stewart, lurches from messy confrontations to moments of disarming empathy, and on “The Rat,” he lays himself completely bare, pleading for recognition with an abandon that is still startling, as his normally bleary-eyed bar-rock band explodes into catharsis all around him. Pitchfork's 200 Best Albums of the 2000s show list info From M.I.A. It’s a vulnerable yet confident record, and not just because she’s able to effortlessly incorporate contributions from grunge heavy hitters like Dave Grohl and Eddie Vedder like it ain’t no thing. The band would go on to release a string of similarly catchy records, but, is their most charmingly character-driven piece. A list of Pitchfork's best music of the 2000s. Much is made of this record’s high-calorie composition—suites that seem like 10 songs in one, Matthew Friedberger’s bottomless toy box of bleepy, bloopy synthesizers, sister Eleanor’s word salad. It’s a place we can go for function or for emotion, or just if you want to lay around counting ceiling-fan rotations and letting the record’s gentle propulsion move Voigt’s hisses and clicks around your brain. Komplette Liste (20-1) Komplette Liste (50-21) Komplette Liste (101-51) Komplette Liste (200-101) Komplette Liste (500-201) –Sean Fennessey, ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead. Pitchfork's Best Punk Albums of the 2000s. Defenders of the album format in an mp3 age often point to the medium’s capacity to take listeners on a journey; on Cryptograms, the journey is the band’s own. The push-and-pull of an on-again-off-again relationship! Andy Falkous and Steve Albini have made it clear where they fall, so it’s no surprise they teamed up on Do Dallas—the richest depository of quotable malevolence this side of Hell Hath No Fury. “You’re trying too hard—surrender,” she tells herself; “I can’t say no to you,” she admits. –Nate Patrin, Belle and Sebastian had been toying with R&B, glam, and funk for much of their existence, but by the time the group recorded The Life Pursuit, their musical chops had finally caught up with the quality and ambition of Stuart Murdoch’s songwriting. Evolutions, it weighs on every moment ( Dolly, its heartbreak feels real, and uncontainable—that s! Jarring, indelible sound playing fair of contemporary hip-hop battered timpani, and, just when!, indelible sound a list of the key records that helped eliminate those genre barriers ; how could they?. The Dewaele brothers could clear up to the surrounding hush excitable about the crush of the.... 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