eMusic's Best Albums of the Decade

#100 Aussie legends un-retire splendidly, with the help of Sleater-Kinney

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  The Friends Of Rachel Worth by The Go-Betweens Pick

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  Twelve years after disbanding the Go-Betweens, Melbourne-based singer/songwriters Robert Forster and Grant McLennan reformed the band they began in 1978 for their seventh album. While they haven't quite picked up where they left off (none of the other original members hopped on board), and the violin/viola that was such an integral aspect of their last few albums appears sporadically, this isn't a huge departure from the trademarked Go-Betweens sound. Poetic, languid, spoken/sung vocals similar to Lou Reed weave between lovely melodies whose appeal unfolds with repeated listens. Strummed guitars and sympathetic drums (sadly, the marvelous percussionist Lindy Morrisson, a mainstay of the band, is missing) spar with Forster and McLennan's breathy, often stream of consciousness vocals. But since the singer/songwriters evenly split the ten tracks, this sounds more like a combination of two solo albums rather than one from a cohesive unit. The backing musicians, which include Olympia's similarly hyphenated Sleater-Kinney, are generally faceless except on the riff-rocking "German Farmhouse" where the band sounds even more like the Velvet Underground than usual. Forster's ode to Patti Smith, the album closing "When She Sang About Angels," is occasionally gorgeous, with half-recited lyrics that sometimes flow yet often sound uncomfortably meshed with the beautiful melody. But on the effervescent "Going Blind," the duo returns to the uncluttered, wistful, folk-pop sound of their best work. While it won't garner new fans, or even make newcomers search out their earlier work, The Friends of Rachel Worth is a convincing if inconsistent return to form. Its highlights recall the past glories of this commercially overlooked band and add a handful of keepers to their best work.

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#99 Sweat-soaked, hip-shakin' garage-pop

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  Realistes by Comet Gain Pick

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  Réalistes sounds like the aural equivalent of a herky-jerk tube ride across London, with clattering, garage-like tunes rollicking along before going underground for a sobering mind-the-gap ballad along the way. The album continues Comet Gain's torrid union of mod punk/soul-pop and garage-indie revisionism. Leader David Feck -- an homage to Dennis Hopper's "check's in the mail" character from The River's Edge perhaps? -- is now the only mainstay since the group formed in 1993. During the rest of the '90s, they were practically the house band at various clubs and, in some respects, not much has changed since then; in fact, the tambourine-and-Hammond-organ-powered "The Kids at the Club" could be the council pub set's next anthem, perfect for a sweat-soaked, hip-shakin' night on the tiles. "Movies," with its recurring boy-girl chorus ("Will you take me to the movies?/I'm feeling groovy"), is going to be a go-go charmer. On the title track, Feck sneers like an atonal Mark E. Smith of the Fall, while those up-the-neck pick-slides might have been ripped from any one of the Jam's better A-sides, circa 1978. Here and there, Réalistes might have benefited from another mixing session. "Don't Fall in Love if You Want to Die in Peace" is one example where the VU-meter spikes into the red, but somehow its weird tangle of swirly organ, echoey vocals, and over-modulated acoustic guitar fits the disc's purposefully ramshackle production by new drummer/"sound guru genius" M.J. "Woody" Taylor. Features guest appearances by Christopher Appelgren (of the Pattern/the PeeChees) on drums, Peter Momtchiloff (lap steel on "Carry on Living"), Anthony Miller (brass arrangement on "Labour"), Kathleen Hanna (Le Tigre, ex-Bikini Kill) contributing venomous riot grrrl vocals on "Ripped-Up Suit!," and the Aislers Set (handclaps).

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#98 Soaring anthems about working-class heroes and hard-luck teenagers

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  The '59 Sound by The Gaslight Anthem Pick

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  With all due respect to Springsteen-loving outfits such as the Hold Steady and Arcade Fire, the Boss already has some local boys who seem to have the apprenticeship locked down tight. The members of New Brunswick, N.J.’s the Gaslight Anthem are young and hungry, earnest to a fault and apparently very eager to impress upon us their warped-cassette copies of Born In The USA: “No surrender, my Bobby Jean,” sings frontman Brian Fallon on the band’s second full-length, economically fitting together his Springsteen references like Tetris blocks. So it’s no surprise that The ’59 Sound is filled with songs about working-class heroes and hard-luck teenagers cruising around in the backseats of cars and washing away sin with cheap whiskey and beer. The shocker is that the Gaslight Anthem has taken these well-worn Jersey-rebel themes and revived them through the sheer power of youth.
  
  Opening with the crackling speaker noise of a needle hitting vinyl, The ’59 Sound echoes all around the ragged-rock corners of a record collection. It particularly tends to linger in mid-period Replacements (circa Tim and Pleased To Meet Me) on “Casanova, Baby!” and the title track, with Fallon nailing the raspy anxiety of Paul Westerberg and small-town malcontents everywhere. Guitarist Alex Levine alternately chugs and chimes, never settling too deep into Social Distortion-style punk riffing or Tom Petty pop jangle, resulting in songs that are more durable than derivative. Even those who would scoff at Fallon cribbing song titles from movies (the single-gal lament “Even Cowgirls Get The Blues,” the ex-girlfriend weeper “Here’s Looking At You, Kid”) have to admit it’s kind of endearing. The Gaslight Anthem is trying too hard in all the right ways.

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#97 - The queen of German electronic music at her brash, bright best

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  Berlinette by Ellen Allien Pick

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  Released on her own label, the increasingly high-profile Bpitch Control, Ellen Allien's second full-length album is more than just an abandoned fairground of Teutonic rhythms, elastic snares, icy synths, and digital sculpture. Demonstrating her mastery of subtle twitch and unconventional nuance, Allien differentiates herself from the rest of the crystalline microhouse mob with playful, humanist touches and on-a-dime midsong reappraisals. Lead track "Alles Sehen" begins with a throbbing electro beat and a gush of warm house swirls before folding into a twinkling vocal pop coda worthy of Lali Puna; "Push" shifts without notice from a grubby, scampering rhythm to a throbbing industrial lockstep; and "Augenblick" wrings form out of a ball of crinkled textures, machine-spat beats, and tremulous Factory Records guitars. But it's the conceptual overlap and idea overflow of the bittersweet "Wish" that resonate strongest -- over a mournful synth line, a quadruple-timed beatbox, and heavily processed acoustic guitar chugs, Allien daydreams herself out of postwar Berlin: "Need a planet without cars and wars...I wish it could be true." Bitingly fierce, technologically adroit, and curiously poppy, Berlinette marks yet another high point in an already superb year for Germanic techno.

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#96 The Frames before the bombast: lovely, sublime and winning

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  For The Birds by The Frames Pick

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  For the Birds opens with "In the Deep Shade," an understated instrumental that sets the mood for the rest of the album. Despite some relatively peppy numbers such as "Fighting on the Stairs," the wailing guitar sound on songs such as "Early Bird" and "Santa Maria," and the expectations some listeners may have for an album recorded with Craig Ward (dEUS) and Steve Albini (Pixies, Nirvana, Rapeman), this is primarily a gentle, slow, and melancholic album. It features melodic, folk-influenced rock songs (somewhere in the general vicinity of Will Oldham and Nick Drake, for example) with clearly discernible instruments including mandolin, piano, violin, brushed drums, and softly strummed guitar, as well as vocals that manage to sound emotive even when they seem hushed. The band says in their liner notes that this was their first chance to record an album without having to "cater to people outside of the band"; consequently, For the Birds features less-commercial arrangements that allow the group to take a leisurely pace, use subtle dynamics and negative space, and gradually build emotional intensity over the course of a song instead of trying to hook listeners immediately. Of course, this is hardly the first band to try this type of approach, but Frames handle it gracefully.

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#95 A dizzying, no-fi take on classic pop

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  The Doldrums by Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti Pick

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  Originally released as a CD-R, this acid-fried eight-track recording by this odd newcomer to Animal Collective's Paw Tracks label is one of the most wonderfully skewed takes on classic pop you're likely to hear. Tape warp and vintage hiss and hum are the outerwear, but some serious '70s radio songcraft dwells underneath. This is the stuff Bowie heard in his dreams when not being terrorized by Satan living in his swimming pool. So dang it if we don't have a lo-fi revival on our hands. But this new batch seems bound and determined to drag listeners back with writing so catchy and sounds so warm that it's impossible to resist. Just pretend you're Steve Buscemi's character in Ghost World, and Maxell cassettes are the new 78-rpm records.

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#94 Perfect songs, beamed in from a 1950s California dreamland

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  Album by Girls Pick

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  Girls' Album is not hip, stylish or inventive. It's a simple, conservative record that has more in common with Dion than with some random hipster band. The songs are focused and uncomplicated — "Lust for Life" is the pop song, "Morning Light" the rocker, "Darling" the ballad — and the production is, too. Objectively, it's all very ordinary. And yet Album is ridiculously listenable and likable, and Girls could become stars from its success.
  
  The music may be straightforward, but Girls themselves are oddballs — and weird people making normal music is always an excellent thing. Girls are led by the odd couple of Christopher Owens and JR White — Owens with long dirty hair and teenaged demeanor and White a brooding, '50s leading man (both are in their late 20s). Owens sings and plays guitar and White plays bass.
  
  Their best moment is "Hellhole Ratrace" — all seven dreamy, monotonous minutes of it. Even though it's little more than a repetition of the same verse and chorus, it's a masterpiece. The melody is simple and refined and the builds and inflections are subtly spectacular. Close is the big, clanging "Summertime" with its verses like: "Lay in the park/ Smoke in the park/ Get high like I used to do/ Summertime/ Soak up the sunshine with you." The guitar and bass pleasantly churn and there's no percussion until the very end. It's nothing but nostalgia.
  
  Album feels very classically late-'50s/early-'60s — the songs are rooted in that style, and even the chord changes are a bit old-fashioned. (None other than Elvis Costello told us that when we played him "Hellhole Ratrace.") Take the lush lullaby "Solitude," the B-side to "Hellhole Ratrace" that rivals anything here, and its soft tenderness that would send '50s homecoming slow-dancers groping for more. Or "Lauren Marie," which feels like a deconstructed Phil Spector ballad, all of the classic elements there but dramatically realigned.
  
  This is an album of songs — not mood or style or ambition. The first few listens might provide a bit of a shock — they certainly did for me. I can't remember the last time an album was so content with simply being what it was, nothing more than that. Already being a massive Girls fan, that bothered me at first, but now, after having spent three months listening to this constantly, it's my favorite thing about it. It sounds like the California you see in movies, a dreamland ruled by simplicity, bright red lipstick and a lover's shoulder. It sounds perfect.

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#93 Before they were radio staples, the Kings were winning our hearts

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  Aha Shake Heartbreak by Kings of Leon Pick

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  This is the Kings of Leon we love. Tight, silly and full of energy, Aha Shake Heartbreak is a thrilling rock record, an album not about art, artifice or bold intent, but an album about now. It's a concise record — like the Strokes, with whom they were so often compared, there are few guitar solos, fewer reprises and no fat. It's a guitar-rock album, pure and simple, and it's one of the finest in recent memory.
  
  Caleb Followill is Kings of Leon's singer and frontman, and his peculiar yelp dances along his staccato vocal lines flawlessly. The interplay between his hiccupping vocals and the riffs of his bandmates is one of Aha Shake Heartbreak's most prevalent charms; songs like "Taper Jean Girl" hinge on that flirtation, shades of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards if you squint hard enough. (Bassist Jared Followill also deserves a ton of credit; he favors lines that pulse like alarm clocks, these rapid, exhilarating bursts of low energy — check "Taper Jean Girl" once more.)
  
  Though Shake Heartbreak has become a hipster dance-party staple (put on "The Bucket" and test it out), its broader cultural relevance has been nil. In the years since, Kings have abandoned almost everything about this approach, instead opting for U2-style grandiosity. It's a shame. This record is that rare breed: an intersection of sound and style (this is, essentially a Strokes album), high and low art (a hipster take on the classic CCR chooglin' sound) and fun, guilt-free sex. This is Utopia's Southern-rock, and we want to go back!

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#92 The mistress of mystery’s stunning 2005 comeback

#91 Music that's for the birds — in the best possible sense

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  Rook by Shearwater Pick

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  The Eels song “I Like Birds” could’ve been written about Shearwater’s Jonathan Meiburg. This Austin, Texas frontman is a graduate student in ornithology, has named the band he started with Okkervil River’s Will Sheff after a seabird, and has titled Shearwater’s fifth album after a European crow. It’s nearly impossible to think of Shearwater’s intimate, emotional music — in particular, Meiburg’s seemingly airborne tenor — without such words as soaring, swooping or sailing. Both the quartet and its singer seem to be, like the winged life with which they’re clearly obsessed, on the verge of defying gravity.
  
  Meiburg’s no longer an Okkervil River member, and unlike previous Shearwater albums, Rook does without Sheff's contributions. This is as it should be: Meiburg's found himself as Shearwater’s guiding force and focus. His wafting vocal performance here and the fluttering arrangements gliding around it transcend Shearwater’s initial side project status as a repository for Meiburg and Sheff's quiet songs. As the grinding midsection of opening cut "On the Death of the Waters" makes clear, Rook gets quite loud in parts. With its lopsided rhythms, multiple distorted guitars, and enraged Meiburg vocal, "Century Eyes" is unabashed post-punk.
  
  These brief excursions in clanging fury heighten the hushed beauty of Rook’s fragile bulk. The band’s austere presence on muted guitars, keyboards, and percussion is magnified by strings, woodwinds and horns that maximize Meiburg’s poised sense of dynamics and drama as the instrumentation rises and falls in support of his keening cry. In "I Was a Cloud," the seemingly aerial accompaniment hovers as the singer lovingly contemplates a sparrow. This would be ridiculous if it wasn’t done with such disarming, heartfelt care.

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#90 What’s the sound of isolation? In Pollard's world, it's sunny and melodic

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  Isolation Drills by Guided By Voices Pick

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  Guided by Voices fans who embraced them as the saviors of lo-fi pop after discovering such four-track-in-a-basement masterpieces as Bee Thousand and Alien Lanes had better learn to live with the fact those days are gone for good -- the high-gloss production of 1999's Do the Collapse made it clear that GBV topkick Robert Pollard wanted his band to compete in rock's big leagues, and Isolation Drills only confirms that notion, sounding even more polished and precise than its precursor. However, if you loved GBV for their songs rather than their sometimes-charming sloppiness, then you'll be glad to hear that Pollard and Company have never used professionalism to better advantage than they do here. While Ric Ocasek's production on Do the Collapse was sympathetic, he clearly favored the pop side of the band's personality at the expense of their muscle (most clearly evidenced by the pseudo-new wave keyboard patches). But with Rob Schnapf behind the controls, Isolation Drills sounds like the real rock album GBV have always wanted to make; Pollard's hooky-but-rollicking melodies pay audible tribute to his great love for mid-'70s rock throughout, while Doug Gillard and Nate Farley's guitars finally crunch as much as they chime, making the band's rock moves as credible as their pop gestures ("Glad Girls" and "Chasing Heather Crazy" even finding them managing both at the same time, to superb effect). And Guided by Voices has never made an album this consistently strong from start to finish; with the possible exception of "Frostman" (which appears to have been processed to sound like it was recorded on four track), every song here matters, with Pollard's vocals at the top of their form (it helps that most of his lyrics actually make sense for a change -- sounds like Bob's been having relationship problems again) and the band sounds tight, forceful, and emphatic throughout. God knows if the indie rock audience will ever forgive him for such obvious craft, but the side of Pollard's personality that thought touring with Cheap Trick was a great idea finally gets the album he's been waiting for with Isolation Drills.

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#89 Brit quartet indulges their pop side

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  No Shouts, No Calls by Electrelane Pick

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  Fan of linear progression? Just erase Electrelane’s previous album, Axes, from your mind and regard No Shouts, No Calls as the confident follow-up to the group’s tentative 2004 pop foray, The Power Out. Axes made a virtue out of jarring transitions and jagged edges, at times making the group sound like an all-female King Crimson. No Shouts, No Calls, on the other hand, opts for sonic cohesion, begging inevitable comparisons to Stereolab.
  
  While Electrelane has the same jones for Krautrock and Farfisa organs as the legendary post-rockers, they regurgitate them differently. Whereas Stereolab is content to groove, the Brighton quartet rocks. Credit Mia Clarke’s versatile guitar — she’s glistening one moment (“Tram 21”), crunchy the next (“At Sea”). Given free rein by a tight rhythm section, Clarke, along with lead singer Verity Susman, gives each of these songs their color.
  
  Susman’s busier than ever on No Shouts, No Calls, singing on nearly every track (Axes was largely instrumental) and providing keyboard work as well. Her lyrics tend towards love (“The Greater Times”: “I’m tearing down the walls without you”), even if it’s mostly the kind of love you’d never think to actually write a song about. (On “To the East” she wants you to move to eastern Germany with her, on “In Berlin” she sings about freezing to death). Perverse? Sure. But Electrelane have always had a rebellious streak to them — let’s just enjoy their turn towards pop as long as we can.

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#88 A slinky, unassuming classic of contemporary R&B

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  Goodies by Ciara Pick

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  Thanks to a few productions by hitmakers Lil Jon and Jazze Pha, there are indeed some Goodies to be found on Ciara's debut album, even if the young dance-pop singer does little to distinguish herself from the legion of fellow young dance-pop singers filling the urban American airwaves. The title track is far and away the highlight here, one of seemingly countless Lil Jon songs to become hits in summer 2004 (others including Usher's "Yeah!," Trillville's "Neva Eva," Lil Scrappy's "No Problem," Pitbull's "Culo," and Petey Pablo's "Freek-a-Leek"). "Goodies" is fairly similar to these songs, except that it's sung by a young girl. In fact, the song is an apparent response to "Freek-a-Leek," employing a near-identical beat and the services of that song's rapper, Petey Pablo. The difference is that while "Freek-a-Leek" took the hardcore rap perspective of courtship, boasting of Petey's sexual exploits and how he can provide all a woman could possibly want physically, Ciara takes the contemporary R&B perspective, boasting contrarily that she has what all the guys want but won't be exploited: "I bet you want the goodies/Bet you thought about it/Got you all hot and bothered/Mad 'cause I talk around it/If you're looking for the goodies/Keep on looking 'cause they stay in the jar." It's a simple song, yes, but it's quite a rousing album opener. From there, the next four songs -- "1, 2 Step," "Thug Style," "Hotline," "Oh" -- are good, if not great, as executive producer Jazze Pha serves up some first-rate beats and catchy hooks here and there. But just as Beyoncé's Dangerously in Love descended into boilerplate balladry during its second half, Goodies unfortunately follows suit, bringing the initial festivities to a cloying conclusion. In the end, the beats of Lil Jon and Jazze Pha are the true Goodies here. Ciara is likeable enough, especially on the dance songs, where she resembles a young Janet Jackson, not so much actually singing as projecting a personality onto the productions. However, when she turns to run-of-the-mill ballads on the album's second half, she seems just as faceless as the songs themselves, lacking panache and, at times, personality.

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#87 Vashti Bunyan and Joanna Newsom fans, meet your new favorite mystic

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  Vid Og Vid by Ólöf Arnalds Pick

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  Ólöf Arnalds plays a gentle brand of folk music that won’t strike anyone with a soft spot for Vashti Bunyan or Joanna Newsom as unfamiliar; her songs have an unusual way of freezing out the external world during the few graced minutes in which they’re alive. Arnalds is all about subtle moments of breath-taking, stop-you-in-your-tracks beauty, and none of them owes to more than the simple aggregation of voice and guitar. Sometimes it’s a lute or something else with strings, but the general pattern remains the same. In “Englar Og Dárar,” Arnalds employs a dexterous finger-picking style made all the more intimate by the close-miked squeak of her hand changing chords; more striking is her voice — a high, round, fleshy coo that sounds both overwhelmed by wonder and weathered by regret. “Klara” makes good use of the lute and finds Arnalds climbing higher in pitch, while the title track makes for a prime singalong lure with a glorious “la la la” refrain. Arnalds has been known to stretch out and experiment (she used to sing in Múm), but Við Og Við answers to a kind of delicate loveliness that is in no way provisional — and certainly not fleeting.

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#86 Perhaps the most surprising and accomplished R&B album of the decade

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  Confessions by Usher

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  For years, Usher was an R&B vampire, siphoning the best from a previous generation: Michael Jackson's moves, Aaron Hall's purr, Tevin Campbell's smile. Then, he came back to life. After some fun, airy early singles, Usher broke up with his girl (TLC's Chili) and jumped in the booth. The results became perhaps the most surprising and accomplished R&B album of the decade. Confessions initially scored because of "Yeah!" the hyperkinetic crunk hybrid lead single with Lil' Jon and Ludacris. But it's a sore thumb on a bejeweled hand. If Usher rarely gave more than a brief glimpse into his inner life, Confessions seemed like straight turmoil. He details his infidelities and subsequent shame, while agonizing over a pregnant mistress and the end of both relationships. After the album's release, Jermaine Dupri, Confessions' primary architect, claimed many of the songs were his story, not Usher's. No matter. The gut-punch realism makes authenticity mean less. And the warm, expansive productions, from Just Blaze's "Throwback" to Dupri's R. Kelly-esque "Burn," to Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis' beguiling "That's What It's Made For," allows an elegant transition from docudrama to sonic exploration. In many ways, this is the last mega-album, selling more than 9 million copies and becoming an R&B fixture. And rightfully so.

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#85 The junk-fi garage master at his stubborn, punky best

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  Blood Visions by Jay Reatard Pick

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  On his first solo album, Jay Reatard...well, judging by the album cover, "grows up" clearly isn't right. Nor is "makes a more mature musical statement" quite on the nose. How about "sucks less"? The Reatards were always a good idea improperly executed: their lo-fi take on the goofball teenage humor of the Queers or the Mr. T Experience had its moments, but they were often in need of an editor and some slightly better-quality recording equipment. Blood Visions is considerably more listenable in terms of fidelity: R. Stevie Moore's '70s and '80s albums would be a reasonable home-recording touchstone. Musically, it's also a big step up, as well as a step into the past. Blood Visions has the antic, jumpy quality of many now-obscure new wave records of the early '80s, from the era when artists like Wazmo Nariz and Skafish thought a funny name and a yelpy, David Byrne-derived singing voice, along with a cheap synth and some narrow sunglasses, were the path to success. By keeping the oddball affectations down to a minimum while keeping up the neurotic post-punk momentum, Reatard burns through 15 aggressively quirky but mostly entertaining songs in just under half an hour. More energy, better sounding, tighter focus, better songs...maybe this IS a more mature musical statement!

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#84 A beguiling mix of indie, electronics, folk and glitchcore

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  Neon Golden by The Notwist Pick

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  The Notwist first surfaced in the early '90s during the grunge years, before they began to experiment with electronic textures on 12 and Shrink. It was on Neon Golden that they got it right, though, and the nods to Autechre and Aphex Twin on “This Room” are an integral part to the music rather than just bolt-on curlicues.
  
  Markus Acher hides a wealth of emotion behind his simple vocal style, recalling Belle and Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch on tracks such as “Pick Up The Phone”. This combination of restrained-but-heartfelt vocalization, mixed with electronic beeps and blats, can be seen as a clear inspiration to later electronic pop acts like The Postal Service. Headphone freaks will find plenty to explore in the dub space of tracks like “Propeller 9,” which layers FX over piano, banjo and sax. The Notwist wrote their first bona-fide gold-medal song in “Pilot,” which sits somewhere between New Order, Arab Strap and the Pet Shop Boys. Maybe back in 2002 this excellent little band were overlooked in favor of the crash, bang, wallop of neo-garage acts like White Stripes and The Hives, but this counterintuitive mix of rootsy, organic music and creaky electronica is a thrilling, unique listen.

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#83 Love him or hate him, Happy People is Kelly's Marvin-channeling masterpiece

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  Happy People/U Saved Me by R. Kelly Pick

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  Ignore, if you can, what you know, or think you know, about R. Kelly, and the rewards — and attendant psychology — of Happy People/U Saved Me are infinite. Half celebration, half hosanna, Robert Kelly indulged his newfound enthusiasm for Chicago's stepping dance craze, and then cried for his creator on this two-disc set. Happy People is 11 consecutive mid-tempo songs, with almost identical rhythms. Not too slow, not too fast — anyone can do it. It's joyful music, and though Kells isn't sharing much about himself here — the title track is basically a repetition of "Keep on dancing, happy people" — its blind glee is hard to ignore. U Saved Me is a far more serious affair. Racked by legal demons, Kelly turned to gospel. Not every hymn is a homerun, but the sheer unashamed ferocity with which he attacks every song is astounding. "How Did U Manage" is aimed directly at God and "I Surrender" is a stone-faced hurtling of his soul — with a nice dash of tropical ambience. R. Kelly has been called a genius, a tyrant, an evil man and a savior. At his weirdest and most desperate, he is, at least, undeniable.

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#82 The young hellraiser becomes a modern-day Woody Guthrie

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  Jerusalem by Steve Earle Pick

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  As he grows older, Steve Earle grows more responsible. The young hell-raiser without a cause has transformed into a modern-day Woody Guthrie — still raising hell, but only if he can also raise consciousness along with it. The centerpiece of Jerusalem is "John Walker's Blues," Earle's unblinking human portrayal of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh that walks in the confused shoes of Lindh's destiny. But while this swaggering blues is the album's most controversial track, that doesn't mean Earle pussyfoots through the rest — even if there is a love song here (the rallying, never-sappy heart-cry of "Go Amanda"). It's Earle's growing frustration with the ever-widening gulf between the have-mores and the have-nots — songs like "Amerika v. 6.0 (The Best We Can Do)" and "What's A Simple Man to Do" say it well — and his foreboding feeling that America is on a dangerous path ("Ashes to Ashes," "Conspiracy Theory") that fuels the anger and sadness of his best songs and bring his sturdy, traditional melodies to life.

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#81 Galvanizing, impressionistic post-bop

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  News On The Rail by Marty Ehrlich Pick

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  The spectacular creativity of the horn arrangement on the opener, “Enough Enough,” with its vamps, counterpoints and chromatic effusions, is something Ehrlich’s mentor, the late World Saxophone Quartet founder and composer Julius Hemphill, would be proud to call his own. Ehrlich plumbs the blues like Hemphill, but uses the musical traditions of Europe rather than Africa as a touchstone. “Light in the Morning (Many Thousand Gone),” for example, uses just brass and reeds to sound like a string symphony. This sextet is Ehrlich’s largest ensemble to date, and occasionally sounds much bigger, due to the horn voicings and way the composer uses secret weapon Howard Johnson for tuba basslines and dark splashes of baritone sax in contrast to his own alto and clarinet work. It amounts to galvanizing, impressionistic post-bop that can go from smoky, gutbucket grooves to esoteric idylls, sometimes within the same, suite-like tune.

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#80 A baroque indie-pop masterpiece

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  Set Yourself On Fire by Stars Pick

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  There’s only one bad thing you can say about Stars’ Set Yourself on Fire: it doesn’t contain career highlight “Elevator Love Letter.” Otherwise, this album is pretty much the perfect indie-pop record, replete with girl/boy harmonizing, epic choruses and the type of catchy tunes that could’ve only been created (these days, anyway) in Canada.
  
  But it’s not just perfect pop constructions. Check the extended coda on the title track, which cuts off the propulsive tune and takes it to outer space. Or “The Big Fight,” where the group seemingly hires a different producer mid-song and turns a plodding lament into an upbeat instrumental. Or the flat-out electro-jazz-punk maelstrom of “He Lied About Death.”
  
  At heart, though, Stars is a pop band, and pop music is about moments that make your heart swell a little bit larger than you thought it could. Fire has plenty of those, too: when drummer Pat McGee starts syncopating on “One More Night,” when the group “woo”’s are indistinguishable from the oscillating synth on “Ageless Beauty,” that one moment of silence before each chorus in “Soft Revolution”… I could go on, but what’s the point? Words are useless when you run up against this type of album. Dig in.

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#79 The most seductive sort of futurism

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  Textstar by Farben Pick

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  Culled from a half-dozen 12-inches issued between 1998 and 2002, Textstar makes a case that Jan Jelinek, the producer behind the Farben alias, was the subtlest and most forward-thinking techno artist of the period. (The work he issued under his own name subsequently only deepened the impression.) Though he was fond of titles like “Live at the Sierra Tahoe, 1973” and “Love to Love You Baby,” his idea of retro would only pass muster in an alternate universe. Even when the boinging electro-tom (see Anita Ward’s “Ring My Bell”) and porn-flick string pads enter midway through “Sierra Tahoe,” or the Curtis Mayfield-knockoff flutes and violins interrupt the symphony for glitch and far-away keyboard rumble that is “Beautone,” they still signify the most seductive sort of futurism.

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#78 A sacred text from the founding father of freakfolk

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  Rejoicing In The Hands by Devendra Banhart Pick

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  No matter how much disdain he voices for the genre, Devendra Banhart is the founding father of contemporary freakfolk, and Rejoicing in the Hands... is its sacred text. Taking cues from late '60s warblers Tiny Tim, Marc Bolan and Donovan, Banhart trills about nonsensical creatures in absurd situations, including his beard and other biological ephemera ("Because my teeth don't bite/ I can take them out dancing") over carefully plucked classical guitar and quick bits of strings. The raven-haired, perennially shirtless Banhart tiptoes the line between Renaissance Faire tomfoolery and backwoods earnestness, and when he stumbles — see the instrumental "Tit Smoking in the Temple of Artisan Mimicry" — the results can be oddly glorious, all nylon guitar swirls and criss-crossing melodies.

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#77 Bluegrass trio crafts their masterpiece

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  Emotionalism by The Avett Brothers Pick

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  It's not hard to find lively and talented young string bands these days, but few possess the magic spark of North Carolina's Avett Brothers (a trio consisting of two brothers and their bass-playing friend). Early on, the Avetts earned a reputation for transcendent live performances but never quite seemed to reach that same level in the studio. On Emotionalism the pieces finally came together; they put less emphasis on trying to document their stage persona and instead concentrated on the considerable pop potential of their songwriting. The result is an album that marries Beatlesque melody to old-time/folk/bluegrass instrumentation with the Avetts' punk roots showing in attitude and energy.

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#76 The album that set them on the road to stardom

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  The Execution of All Things by Rilo Kiley Pick

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  Are they an indie rock band inspired by country, or a country band influenced by indie rock? Whichever the case may be, The Execution of All Things finds Rilo Kiley establishing a wonderful balance of beautiful indie rock and subtle country. Several guests are on such instruments as French horn, cello, flute, and accordion, while there's also a "boy choir" that includes Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes. It all adds brilliantly to Rilo Kiley's passionate and powerful songwriting. "With Arms Outstretched" evokes a country feel in its lyrics, yet has all the sensibility of indie pop. "It's 16 miles to the promised land and I promise you I'm doing the best I can," Jenny Lewis sings. "I visit these mountains with frequency and I stand here with my arms up." You may want to watch out for the unexpected, though infrequent, foul language, but otherwise this strong follow-up to Take-Offs & Landings fits right in with the already respected Saddle Creek roster.

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#75 Blues duo brings the gritty sound of...Ohio

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  Rubber Factory by The Black Keys Pick

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  What hath White Stripes wrought? Suddenly, blues duos are everywhere, which is certainly better than when blues "deconstructionists" (it's still unclear what they even are) were everywhere. The most buzzed-about duo, the Black Keys, up the ante over their competition from both camps by actually demonstrating a decent feel for bedrock blues. Not that they're purists — there's a reason why drummer Patrick Carney and guitarist/fiddler/vocalist Dan Auerbach wear their industrial hometown of Akron, Ohio, on their sleeves as proudly as Devo did. That's most apparent on the metallic riff-raunch of "10 A.M. Automatic," especially when Auerbach unleashes distortion and fuzztone that'd rattle Ike Turner's fillings.
  
  Even when they're playing the most conventional blues, the Black Keys amp it up. But they're capable of doing so without sacrificing nuance on songs like "Girl Is on My Mind," and Carney swings almost as hard as he thumps on the opening "When the Lights Go Out." "The Lengths" is about as pastoral as they get, while "Act Nice and Gentle" is affectingly lyrical, and their remake of Robert Pete Williams' great "Grown So Ugly" is as earthy as some of Captain Beefheart's blues interpretations.
  
  Auerbach is no great shakes as a singer, but does the best he can with the limited voice he has to work with. Purists may be repelled, but this pair offers as much meat, in its own way, as most of the purist revivalist bands, and a lot more surprise.

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#74 The sound of a single upraised middle finger

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  McLusky Do Dallas by Mclusky Pick

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  McLusky Do Dallas is a monumental leap from the somewhat uneven My Pain and Sadness Is More Sad and Painful Than Yours. Comparisons to the Pixies are still inevitable, but McLusky comes out of the closet as a group of extreme noise mongers here. Every bit as dynamic, thunderous, and accomplished as Relationship of Command, Come on Pilgrim, and Nevermind, the album is almost criminal in its continuous, joyous crunchy hooks and all-out sneer. If they were treading water a bit on their debut, they're now masters of sonic punch and, like the Pixies, they might just have producer Steve Albini to thank, as he mans the boards here with genius abandon. Every one of the album's 14 songs is a standout, and with only three of the songs going past the three-minute mark, the band makes its point, drives it home, and pulls out. It's a truly exhilarating listen across every one of its 34 smart, snarling, and loud minutes. The mad vocals of Andy Falkous make Black Francis look like a geeky school kid in comparison, as he rips into bizarre lyrical territory, screaming or whispering about being "naked from f*cking too much," torching restaurants, "cartoon monkeys," "going straight to hell," and having "crazy f*cking times, 'til our Visa card expired." Falkous acts like a mad maestro, conducting the maelstrom of fuzzy guitars that constantly swarm around his snide, sharp vocals. When he pauses midsong to announce "bring on the big guitars" or "my love is bigger than your love, sing it," he's onto something truly special and compelling. The band's sense of timing is stellar, and there's not a false note in sight, as each tempo change highlights a hook or an emotion to a T. "Gareth Brown Says" is a perfect example of McLusky's twisted charm, as Falkous sings, "All of your friends are c**ts, your mother is a ballpoint pen thief," and it immediately brings to mind Lydon's girl from Birmingham. The entire album captures the energy of Blur's "Song 2," only full of conviction, wit, and fury, and filters and rearranges it as if it's been performed by a mad hybrid of the Pixies, the Sex Pistols, Nirvana, the Jesus Lizard, and Joy Division. McLusky Do Dallas is a fascinating, addictive album that never grows old, never takes itself too seriously, and never grates despite its absolutely raging dynamics, and it's one of the best albums of 2002.

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#73 Two pasty Swedes make the best beach album of 2007

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  West Coast by Studio Pick

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  Before they became Studio, the duo of Dan Lissvik and Rasmus Hägg, helped guide the Service label — one of Sweden's most fertile indie imprints and home to Jens Lekman and the Whitest Boy Alive. Lissvik and Hägg are far more influenced by contemporary dance music, however. (Studio may be Nordic, but their sound is pure Balearic.) Sinuous guitar lines wrap themselves around basslines that more often than not ride the two and the four, while synthesizers approximate steel drums or nurse ping-pong melodies. "Life's a Beach," for example, clocks in at nearly thirteen minutes, riding a hypnotic groove ripened just so for the inevitable remixes, while "West Side" takes a page from Art of Noise's "Moments in Love" and lets disembodied vocal stabs carry the tune.
  
  Those vocals, the oft-delayed guitars, the ever-present bongos, the melodica on "Origin," the sound of glittering, lapping waves: West Coast is full of tropical signifiers. (Except for "Indo." We have no idea what that means at all.) All of which should help make this afro-prog-disco-yacht-rock stunner a must-have for your next trip to the beach. Surf's up!

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#72 Miles Davis meets the sounds of India in a meeting of minds and cultures

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  Miles From India by Various Artists - Four Quarters Records Pick

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  Mixing the music of jazz icon Miles Davis with sounds and instruments from India, as producers Bob Belden and Yusuf Gandhi did on Miles from India, was far from an outrageous proposition. Davis set the precedent himself — not only with his use of Indian players like the tabla virtuoso Badal Roy in sessions issued on albums like Big Fun and Get Up with It, but also with his sinuous modal compositions stretching back to 1959's epochal Kind of Blue and continuing through his electric period of the '70s.
  
  Belden, who masterminded the long series of Davis box sets issued by Sony, knows the trumpeter's back pages better than anyone. Together with Gandhi, he arranged a globe-spanning series of sessions that mixed the cream of India's impressive upstart jazz scene with an unprecedented cadre of Davis sidemen spanning the leader's greatest decades: Kind of Blue drummer Jimmy Cobb; bassist Ron Carter from the second great quintet of the late '60s; electric-era sidemen like Chick Corea, John McLaughlin, Pete Cosey and Michael Henderson; and '80s collaborators including Marcus Miller and Mike Stern.
  
  What makes Miles from India so endlessly compelling is its complete avoidance of easy cultural appropriation. Instead, this is a true meeting of minds and cultures, pointing out connections that were always latent in this much-explored canon. Listen, for example, to trumpeter Wallace Roney's sublime Davis evocations in the opening track, "Spanish Key," and compare the vocalized contours of his lines to the spirited singing of Shankar Mahadevan. A common spirit could hardly be more evident.
  
  In that same track, Indian-American alto saxophonist Rudresh Mahanthappa offers an even more organic integration of two seemingly disparate traditions, while Davis alum Dave Liebman sets aside his saxophones to offer a sublime improvisation on Indian flute. So it goes throughout this endlessly fascinating set. More than simply a new look at Davis's towering achievements, Miles from India provides compelling evidence of jazz's endless capacity for growth and revitalization through an influx of strong personalities, found both on the corner and around the world.

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#71 The ingénue reinvents herself as a belting R&B classicist

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  The Diary Of Alicia Keys by Alicia Keys Pick

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  The Ingénue grows up. Fresh off her five Grammy wins for her 12-times-platinum debut, 2002's steely-but-bland Songs in A Minor, the much-hyped, glued-to-her-piano-bench protégé of record impresario Clive Davis discovers some funk to go along with her affection for "classy" classic soul. Sprinkling in collaborations with producers Kanye West (the wondrous "You Don't Know My Name") and Timbaland (the Stevie-channeling "Heartburn"), along with several self-produced efforts, Keys reinvents herself as a belting diva, a '70s-slurping hero worshipper, and a damned good songwriter. Her diaristic portraits are vague, but inviting; ruthlessly catchy, and simply arranged. Though at times it's hard to tell which decade this album was recorded in — "If I Ain't Got You" is pure Atlantic-era Aretha — the occasional hip-hop influence creeps in. Whether nodding at The Notorious B.I.G. on "If I Was Your Woman," or flirting with (gasp!) a drum machine on the otherwise staid "Slow Down," Keys is not simply a woman out of time. She's an R&B classicist, tirelessly working to foment interest in the past, without adhering to the tricks of the present.

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#70 The album that bridged the dance/minimalist divide

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  Vocal City by Luomo Pick

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  One of the most astonishing debuts of the past decade, Vocal City is the album that, more than any, crossed the divide between experimental electronica and body-shaking house grooves. Finnish producer Vladislav Delay had made his name with long suites of dubby, otherworldly drift, and he applies the same principle here — the difference is that his usual technique tenses exquisitely against beats, bass lines and textures as earthy as any in the "straight" house scene. A sense of dread curls inside much of the album, surfacing in the way ordinary hooks ("Because you move/The way you move/I've got to keep on moving with you," from "Synkro"; "There's nothing in this world you can do for me/I've done everything for you," from "Market") mutate, thanks to Delay's treatment of them — he pushes them through, over, under and around the music, until they mesh in ways that still startle years later.

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#69 Soul classics, dirtied up in the garage

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  Ultraglide In Black by The Dirtbombs

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  Take a stack of soul platters from the 1960s and 1970s from the likes of Smokey Robinson & the Miracles, Sly & the Family Stone, Curtis Mayfield, Marvin Gaye, and Stevie Wonder; mix generously with a propulsive mix of two bass guitars, two drummers, and the vocals of a Detroit rock legend; and you have an underrated gem in the Motor City music scene. Ultraglide in Black puts a rock spin on recognizable nuggets of soul and funk while retaining the original version's integrity and message. Most of the tunes covered here are spirited party tracks, including a sparkling version of Gaye's "Got to Give It Up" that features a strident breakdown. Vocalist Mick Collins, of the Gories fame, paints each track with a flavorful delivery which at times will have the listener literally transported to AM radio's yesteryear. The Dirtbombs have created a record that is akin to stumbling across a box of cool records in your parent's attic, and is suitable for continuous play at any house party.

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#68 Call it "Magical Mystery Two"

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  Rings Around The World by Super Furry Animals Pick

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  Super Furry Animals' leap to a major label in the U.K. with Rings Around the World isn't that drastic of a change -- Fuzzy Logic was also released on Epic in the U.S., Creation was subsidized by Sony, and they never were exactly wanting of money on their previous records -- but the band nevertheless seizes the opportunity to consolidate their strengths, providing an introduction for listeners that may not have been paying attention before. As such, it's hard not to consider it as a bit of a missed opportunity, since this is the first SFA album not to progress from its predecessor, or offer the shock of the new, and that's hard not to miss -- but, if this is the first SFA record you hear, it'll likely intrigue, even dazzle, with its kaleidoscopic blend of pop, prog, punk, psych, and electronica. Still, this is nearly Super Furry Cliff Notes, offering a glossy, big-screen variation on all of their themes -- decadently lush pop-psych, chugging rock & roll, bitter leftism, sublimely warped imagery, experimentalism wrapped in luxurious productions. Alluring, to be sure, and satisfying, too, and there certainly are wonderful details scattered throughout the album, the least of which are cameos by John Cale and Paul McCartney. Plus, there is exceptional songwriting here, such as the cinematic "Juxtaposed With U," "Sidewalk Serfer Girl," and "Receptacle for the Respectable," which encapsulates nearly every side of the band within five minutes. Still, it's hard not to want a little more from the band that was the best pop band of the late '90s. It's hard not to at least want surprises (since there are none) or, if it's going to be a consolidation, to have it be a statement of purpose, since it lacks either an overarching theme or a music that gels. So, it's not what it could have been, but what it is is still pretty damn great, satisfying with its melodies, textures, and ideas. Compared to what Super Furry Animals have done before, Rings Around the World pales slightly but noticeably, but compared to the dead world of mainstream and indie rock in 2001, it still shines brightly.

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#67 Brash, brilliant country music with snarl and spark

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  Crazy Ex-Girlfriend by Miranda Lambert Pick

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  Miranda Lambert didn't win the first Nashville Star in 2003, but she sure is the first bona fide star the televised music competition has produced, as her stellar 2007 sophomore album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt. Taking her cue from the vengeful spurned woman of "Kerosene," her hit debut single, Lambert has built her second album around a tough-chick persona, something that may be clear from the very title of the album, but this isn't a one-dimensional record by any stretch. Sure, she plays the crazy ex-girlfriend of the title track -- stalking her beau and his new girl to the local bar, which she promptly starts tearing apart -- but that's hardly the extent of her hell-raising here. She takes righteous revenge on a guy who slapped her around on the rocking opener, "Gunpowder and Lead" ("he wants a fight, well now he's got one"), she's stranded without booze in a "Dry Town," and she breaks hearts left and right on the surging, hard-edged "Down," while she searches in vain for a good fling on "Guilty in Here," where she wonders what became of "all the boys that only want one thing." That line reveals that Lambert has a sly sense of humor, but she's not joking around: these are lean, hard-hitting, tuneful country songs, delivered with a classic outlaw strut and a vicious modern punch. If Lambert has a thin, almost girlish voice, she's hardly girly -- there's an edge to her delivery that leaves no doubt that she possess nerves of steel. But for as strong as she sounds on the plentiful rockers here, Lambert also lets her guard down on Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, as she as she soaks her "Love Letters" with tears, sweetly sighs in "Desperation," and sadly wishes she was "More Like Her" as she looks on as her ex-lover returns to his old love. This last song provides a neat flip side to the rampaging title track, which also hints at this album's complexity. There are songs that are larger than life, songs that are achingly intimate, and they all add up to rich artistic statement of purpose that is also a hell of a lot of fun. Miranda Lambert knows exactly who she is as a musician, and nowhere is that clearer than how the three covers here -- Gillian Welch co-wrote "Dry Town," Carlene Carter and Susanna Clark penned "Easy from Now On" (which Emmylou Harris popularized), and Patty Griffin authored "Getting Ready" (also heard on her own 2007 album, Children Running Through) -- blend seamlessly with Lambert's eight originals. Every one of the 11 songs shares the same spirit and Lambert's is strong enough of a writer to hold her own with such heavy-hitters, possessed with a wry wit and clear eye for little details, mining the unexpected from such familiar subjects as love and loss and jealously and rage. Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would have been impressive if it was just a showcase of her strengths as a singer or as a songwriter, but since it is both, it's simply stunning, a breakthrough for Lambert and one of the best albums of 2007, regardless of genre.

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#66 Passion trumps precision on Okkervil's rawest album

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  Down the River of Golden Dreams by Okkervil River Pick

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  Down the River of Golden Dreams is the record Okkervil River has been threatening to make since its 2000 issue, Stars Too Small to Use. Songwriter Will Sheff has turned out his nicest batch of tunes here and reined in his voice just enough to communicate his ideas without pushing too hard, while simultaneously keeping the urgency and emotive qualities he showcased on the predecessor to this record, Don't Fall in Love with Everyone You See. Because of this, Down the River of Golden Dreams is easily the group's most cohesive record to date, and solidifies Okkervil River as a band worthy of scrutiny. The fluidity of Sheff's thoughtful lyrics align with his ability to play with tension, which comes across rather nicely on the jaunty "It Ends with a Fall," the dynamic epic "The War Criminal Rises and Speaks," and the delicate "Maine Island Lovers." The band has grown into a tighter unit with a knack for some nice arrangements -- which again was hinted at on Okkervil River's previous releases, but not fully realized until now. Liberal use of Rhodes, Hammond organ, and Mellotrons is the catalyst of these songs, leading the strings and horns through crescendos and textural landscapes without losing the raw nature that has always suited Okkervil River's honesty and desire to connect with the listener on an emotional level very well.

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#65 A space disco classic

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  It's A Feedelity Affair by Lindstrom Pick

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  Hans-Peter Lindstrøm is one half of Norwegian beardo-disco duo Lindstrøm & Prins Thomas. While the two work in nearly-psychic tandem together, they are also maddeningly prolific producers and musicians on their own. When not making infinitely pliable space jams on a battery of guitar, analog keyboards and drums, Lindstrøm remixes the likes of LCD Soundsystem and Franz Ferdinand. On his debut I Feel Space, he mixes jittery arpeggiations ("Fast and Delirious") with sybaritic and slinky hi-hats ("Music in My Mind"). In Lindstrøm's early-morning world, disco's dancefloor throb couples with archaic ambient presets, making for a remarkable (albeit highly addictive) sonic speedball.

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#64 A sizzling collection of forgotten soul music

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  The Funky 16 Corners by Various Artists - Stones Throw Records Pick

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  Over the later '90s and especially the '00s, rare-funk comps have abounded, on eMusic and elsewhere. As with most ubiquitous things, the quality varies greatly. This 2001 collection, though, will have you moving from beginning to end; even better, its compilers, Stones Throw founder Egon and DJ-producer Peanut Butter Wolf, fully licensed every cut. (This is rarer than you might guess.) Most of these tracks are delightful rhythm bonbons, from the squirming Moog and fleet guitar riffs of Bad Medicine's "Trespasser" to Billy Ball and the Upsetters' "Tighten Up Tighter," which basically throws a couple new licks and cities onto Archie Bell & the Drells' "Tighten Up." When it moves this well, only Bell's lawyers can complain.

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#63 Wyatt at his brilliant, bizarre best

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  Comicopera by Robert Wyatt Pick

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  More immediately accessible and warm than Cuckooland, more ambitious than Shleep, Comicopera, in three acts, is the end result of Robert Wyatt looking around and examining the craziness and wild unpredictability in real life in 2007. Knowing one man's opinion of things hardly matters, he brings together musicians from Israel, Spain, England, Norway, Cuba, Brazil, and Colombia in songs that originate with him, but also from these places and Italy. It's full of humor, horror, absurdity, shoulder-shrugging "what?"-styled confusion, exasperation, and even nostalgia, though his particular brand of that is with the eyes wide open. The sound of the record is what immediately separates it from its predecessors: it feels more like a recording made in a studio with a live band than one assembled in pieces. And indeed, in many cases, that's what happened. Old friends like Brian Eno, Phil Manzanera, and Annie Whitehead are present, some not so old ones like Paul Weller and Karen Mantler, and other collaborators he has more recently encountered in Anja Garbarek, Orphy Robinson, Yaron Stavi, Mônica Vasconcelos, Gilad Atzmon, Chucho Merchán, Maurizio Camardi, and Alfonso Santimone, just to name a few, with songwriting contributions from his companion Alfie Benge, Garbarek, and Eno, among others. The first five tracks, under the heading "Lost in Noise," are centered on personal observations of love and loss, and at 62, Wyatt has seen his share of friends pass on and ends with a bomb going off. The middle section "The Here and Now," from cuts six through eleven, examine what it actually means to be English under these circumstances -- i.e. in a war -- and the third, "Away with the Fairies," in tracks 12-16, is where Wyatt's narrator, utterly fed up with the messiness, violence, conflict, and the real noise of life, completely abandons singing in the English language. The truth of the matter is it sounds far more "high concept" than it is. Wyatt claims that his method of working is that he just collects bits of things and puts them together. The songs in the first section are lovely, tender, bittersweet, airy, and melancholic. On "Stay Tuned," Wyatt sings as a narrator who is nothing more than particles of air: "In between/lost in noise/somewhere/somewhere..." as Garbarek's voice soars wordlessly above in between verses, as Eno's keyboards and effects, Seaming To's clarinet and harmony vocal, Whitehead's trombone, and Stavi's bass violin create a kind of chamber jazz around those words, hovering in the front. Letting the words assert themselves like a whisper in the ear or a voice in a dream, Vasconcelos takes the lead vocal as the accusing betrayed lover on the jazzy pop ballad "Just as You Are," and Wyatt takes on the mess, about trying to make excuses. The center is punctuated by Paul Weller's guitar, Wyatt playing hand percussion, and Stavi's bass violin creating the most taut sort of discomfort between the voices. England becomes a place where there is a beautiful day for walking about -- as Manzanera's guitar strolls along through "A Beautiful Peace" before Wyatt lets the cat out of the bag: "but not here," because a bomb has gone off and war has begun. Religion gets skewered too -- albeit with his characteristic subtle and dry wit despite the very real anger and emotion -- and the jazz just keeps coming. Wyatt's narrator switches places amid the finger popping subtle jazz and lilting rock tunes and he becomes the bomber (he makes no distinction as to which one is officially military or terrorist because all the man wants is peace, not bombs of any kind) as well as the bombed, who have either no idea what the hell is going on or who have done their own part to participate by their blind and numb assent. There is a hint of what's to come in part three with the instrumental "On the Town Square," with Wyatt on cornet, Del Bartle on electric guitar, and Gilad Atzmon's tenor saxophone, all playing around a killer rhythm by Robinson on steel pans. ("A Beautiful War" is a scathing indictment of the wars we watch on TV without wondering about the consequences of them.) His and Mantler's voices here are almost like nursery rhymes: "It's a beautiful day/For a daring raid/I can see my prey from afar/So I open the hatch/And drop the first batch/It's a shame I'll miss the blaze/But I'll see the film within Days/And I'll get to see the replay/Of my beautiful day..." On the next cut, "Out of the Blue," the aftermath of such actions becomes clear: he and Eno wrap their voices in something akin to true strangeness and horror: "For Reasons beyond all understanding/You've blown my house apart/You've set me free/To let you know/you've planted/everlasting hatred in my heart/You've planted your everlasting hatred in my heart." Jazz is a not so subtle subtext here, as a social force as well as an aesthetic one, and while these songs of Wyatt's and his collaborators may not be rooted in what Blue Note releases these days as acceptable, they are far more interesting. These tunes are also quite literally almost as accessible in their way as anything on the mighty Domino imprint (Franz Ferdinand's home) that this set has been issued on, even without screaming guitars and popping snare drums. In the third section, Wyatt's protagonist just goes off to find out what else is in the world, singing in Spanish and Italian. Poems by Lorca are set to music (and Wyatt plays a mean pocket trumpet as well as keyboards, and handles percussion). Abandonment of the conflict seems like the only proper thing for a world citizen to do. Here is where players like Robinson playing steel pan drums and vibes, subdued Latin and Caribbean rhythms, and jazz all get mixed up together in a seamless and quite lovely brew. (Check the instrumental by Robinson called "Pastafari.") The final cut may be a bit troubling in that it is a reading of Carlos Puebla's homage to Che Guevara, "Hasta Siempre Comandante." But it's nostalgic, not defiant; not blind assent, but a reverie, that if anything seems to wonder what happened to get from idealism to this place the protagonist finds himself in. And, if idealism is to come from anywhere, it must come from outside the English-speaking world. It's one of the hippest tracks here, played by a killer Italian band (with help from the voices of Wyatt, Mantler, and Vasconcelos), playing a wonderful meld of rhumba and jazz. Comicopera may not be all comic, and indeed inverts the entire comic opera notion of beginning with a catastrophe and ending with redemption, but Wyatt's never been so simple. What he has been, however, is close to brilliant, and this delightfully engaging little set will, if heard, more likely than not bring more people sniffing 'round his large body of work than anything he's done since the early '90s.

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#62 El-P takes mid-period hip hop beats and covers them with slime

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  Fantastic Damage by El-P Pick

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  After virtually inventing everything good and bad about indie hip-hop in the mid-'90s with his crew Company Flow, El-P went solo and founded the Def Jux label in 2001. Like his production work on the incredible 2001 debut from Cannibal Ox, his 2002 solo album Fantastic Damage takes beats from the mid-period hip-hop he grew up on and covers them with slime, mottles them with rust and builds a clanking steam-punk music more menacing than funky. As for the words, it's hard to say El has "flow," though his untamed gusts of verbiage are impressive. Just pretend you're listening to Henry Rollins reading sci-fi novels and you'll be fine.

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#61 A genre-busting neo-pop masterpiece. Really.

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  FutureSex/LoveSounds by Justin Timberlake Pick

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  Give Justin Timberlake credit for this: he has ambition. He may not have good instincts and may bungle his execution, but he sure has ambition and has ever since he was the leading heartthrob in *NSYNC. He drove the teen pop quintet to the top of the charts, far exceeding their peers the Backstreet Boys, and when the group could achieve no more, he eased into a solo career that earned him great sales and a fair amount of praise, largely centered on how he reworked the dynamic sound of early Michael Jackson at a time when Jacko was so hapless he turned away songs that later became JT hits, as in the Neptunes-propelled "Rock Your Body." That song and "Cry Me a River" turned his 2002 solo debut, Justified, into a blockbuster, which in turn meant that he started to be taken seriously -- not just by teens-turned-adult, but also by some rock critics and Hollywood, who gave him no less than three starring roles in the wake of Justified. Those films all fell victim to endless delays -- Alpha Dog aired at Sundance 2006 but didn't see release that year, nor did Black Snake Moan, which got pushed back until 2007, leaving Edison Force, a roundly panned Shattered Glass-styled thriller that sneaked out onto video, as the first Timberlake film to see the light of day -- but even if silver screen stardom proved elusive, Justin didn't seem phased at all, and his fall 2006 album FutureSex/LoveSounds proves why: he'd been pouring all his energy into his second album to ensure that he didn't have a sophomore slump. If Michael Jackson was the touchstone for Justified, Prince provides the cornerstone of FutureSex/LoveSounds, at least to a certain extent -- Timbaland, Timberlake's chief collaborator here (a move that invites endless endlessly funny "Timbaland/Timberlake" jokes), does indeed spend plenty of time on FutureSex refurbishing the electro-funk of Prince's early-'80s recordings, just like he did with Nelly Furtado's Loose, and Timberlake's obsession with sex does indeed recall Prince's carnivorous carnality of the early '80s. But execution is everything, particularly with Timberlake, and if the clumsy title of FutureSex/LoveSounds wasn't a big enough tip-off that something is amiss here -- the clear allusion to Speakerboxxx/The Love Below would seem like an homage if there weren't the nagging suspicion that Timberlake didn't realize that the OutKast album bore that title because it was two records in one -- a quick listen to the album's opening triptych proves that Justin doesn't quite bring the robotic retro-future funk he's designed to life. Hell, a quick look at the titles of those first three songs shows some cracks in the album's architecture, as they reveal how desperate and literal Timberlake's sex moves are. Each of the three opening songs has "sex" sandwiched somewhere within its title, as if mere repetition of the word will magically conjure a sex vibe, when in truth it has the opposite effect: it makes it seem that Justin is singing about it because he's not getting it. Surely, his innuendos are bluntly obvious, packing lots of swagger but no machismo or grace. They merely recycle familiar scenarios -- making out on the beach, dancing under hot lights, acting like a pimp -- in familiar fashions, marrying them to grinding, squealing synths that never sound sweaty or sexy; if they're anything, they're the sound of bad anonymous sex in a club, not an epic freaky night with a sex machine like, say, Prince. But Prince isn't the only idol Justin Timberlake wants to emulate here. Like any young man with a complex about his maturity, he wants to prove that he's an adult now by singing not just about sex but also serious stuff, too -- meaning, of course, that drugs are bad and can ruin lives. Like the Arctic Monkeys deploring the scummy men who pick up cheap hookers in Sheffield, Justin has read about the pipe and the damage done -- he may not have seen it, but he sure knows that it happens somewhere, and he's put together an absurd Stevie Wonder-esque slice of protest pop in "Losing My Way," where he writes in character of a man who had it all and threw it all away...or, to use Justin's words, "Hi, my name is Bob/And I work at my job," which only goes to show that Timberlake lacks a sense of grace no matter what he chooses to write about. Graceless he may be, but Timberlake is nevertheless kind of fascinating on FutureSex/LoveSounds since his fuses a clear musical vision -- misguided, yes, but clear all the same -- with a hammyness that only a child entertainer turned omnipresent 21st century celebrity can be. Timberlake yearns to be taken seriously, to be a soulful loverman like Marvin Gaye coupled with the musical audaciousness of Prince, yet still sell more records than Michael Jackson -- and he not only yearns for that recognition, he feels entitled to it, so he's cut and pasted pieces from all their careers, cobbling together his own blueprint, following it in a fashion where every wrong move is simultaneously obvious and surprising. There is no subtlety to his music, nor is there much style -- he's charmless in his affectations, and there's nothing but affectations in his music. At least this accumulation of affectations does amount to a semblance of personality this time around -- he's still a slick cipher as a singer, yet he is undeniably an auteur of some sort, one who has created an album that's stilted and robotic, but one who doggedly carries it through to its logical conclusion, so the club jams and slow jams both feel equally distant and calculated. There is, however, a flair within the production, particularly in how foreign yet familiar its retro-future vibe sounds.

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#60 Dylan's stunning late-period renaissance

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  Love And Theft by Bob Dylan

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  Its title swiped from an Eric Lott book about minstrelsy, its music palmed from a smattering of vintage 78s and 45s, a few of its lines appropriated from a biography of a Japanese gangster, this is 100% a late-model Bob Dylan masterpiece. It's a magpie wonder, slyly observing the millions of little thefts and other injustices that make up the American pop, jazz, blues and country traditions he loves so dearly, even as he adds a few to the pile. His voice is shot to hell, which just makes his jump blues and riverside meditations sound sager, and his lyrical persona is a marvelously cranky, funny old guy, chatting on key as much as he sings — on no previous Dylan album would it have been possible to imagine the phrases "2 a.m. booty call" and "Freddie or not, here I come." And what's he singing about this time? Mostly what to do while everyone's waiting for the Apocalypse to arrive — which it effectively does on the album's centerpiece, "High Water (For Charlie Patton)," a brother to Patton's song about the great Mississippi flood of 1927. In the meantime, there's love, of course, and sparing the defeated, and cracking the occasional joke, and returning to the crackling shellac that keeps the moonlight of the past shining.

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#59 Beautiful, dizzying vocals are the center of this spare solo debut

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  For Emma, Forever Ago by Bon Iver Pick

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  After splitting with his former band (DeYarmond Edison, who, after relocating to North Carolina, reformed as Megafaun), Justin Vernon holed up in a remote Wisconsin hunting cabin for four frigid months, recording the tracks that would later comprise For Emma, Forever Ago, his haunting debut as Bon Iver. For Emma was self-released by Vernon in 2007 before being picked up by Jagjaguwar in 2008, and while the record may now be an official, bar-coded release, it still feels more like buried treasure, caked with dirt and full of secrets.
  
  Vernon’s high, lonesome yowls are multi-tracked over (mostly) spare acoustic strums; unsurprisingly, Vernon’s guitar feels secondary to his vocals, which are pretty and threatening, primed-to-pierce icicles dangling from a rooftop. Tracks like “Skinny Love” — which, like most of For Emma, sees Vernon lowing about failed relationships — feel distinctly cautionary, with Vernon earnestly admonishing his listeners to be patient, fine, balanced, kind. For Emma is packed with these sorts of tiny lessons and Vernon’s spooky, otherworldly instrumentation only cements the celestial vibe — the cumulative effect is enough to make you momentarily consider camping out in an ice-crusted hut for a long winter, just to see what you can learn about life.

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#58 Roving, experimental jazz, brave and restless

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  Keystone by Dave Douglas Pick

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  Dave Douglas is among the most ambitious jazzmen in recent history. The sheer breadth and depth of his catalog is, when taken as a whole, rather startling, not only for its ambition but for its remarkable consistency. Keystone is Douglas' tribute to Roscoe "Fatty" Arbunkle, one of the first real movie stars who was destroyed by a scandal that took three trials to have him exonerated of all charges. But it took its toll: Arbunkle was essentially ruined by it, and the rumors of that time still persist. Douglas sets the record straight in his liner notes here. Keystone is a double-disc set with a DVD of Arbunkle's short silent films with the soundtrack provided by Douglas. The other is a CD of the full pieces that stands on its own as an album. This is Douglas' electronic band and features Jamie Saft on Wurlitzer piano, DJ Olive on turntables, drummer Gene Lake, saxophonist Marcus Strickland, and bassist Brad Jones. David Torn co-produced the album with Douglas and is like a silent member of the band because of his atmospheric touches and nuances. This is a groove-oriented recording. Douglas goes for the easy, loping, languid shapes and colors that are both impressionistic and expressionistic in the formal aesthetic senses of those terms. Certainly Bill Frisell (a frequent Douglas collaborator) set a precedent with his two albums devoted to the films of Buster Keaton, but Douglas takes it a step further to what feel more like songs in their structures. There are melodies here one can hum to. Compositionally, one can hear Wayne Shorter in these tunes, as he wrote for the early Miles Davis electric band. (And one wonders what Miles would have thought of this approach by Douglas.) Keystone is more accessible and lyric than Freak In (2003), but it shares the same restraint and fine taste to showcase the savvy and swagger of his band rather than the technology available. The technology used on the set is an enhancement to a band playing in the studio rather than as a crutch to lean on. It is not intrusive, but rather a reflective backdrop from which the band articulates its lyric approach. Nowhere is this more evident than on the opener, "A Noise from the Deep"; the utterly elegant and graceful "Mabel Normand"; the spooky yet graceful "The Real Roscoe"; and the funky, swinging "Famous Player," all of which are in the center of the record. Keystone is an excellent, brave, and exciting offering from a man whose talent and vision are perfectly balanced.

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#57 As good as you remember, possibly better

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  Labor Days by Aesop Rock Pick

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  So many musical crimes have been committed in the name of "conscious hip-hop" in the years since Labor Days was released, it's become impossible to consider this gloomy forerunner with anything other than mounting skepticism. You've been in this situation before — returned to a book you loved in college only to find it hamfisted and overwritten, stared at your once-beloved Beat Generation box set with a mixture of dread and shame.
  
  The good news I bring you is this: Labor Days is as good as you remember, possibly better. Aesop's million-syllable-a-second surrealism is still arresting: he lets loose a barrage of sound then yawns out the final word, a weird, disorienting cadence that remains stupefying no matter how many times you hear it. "Fantastic planet urchin putting work in/ Searching for pertinent verse, minus the murderous diversions/ Apologies won't lure me to the communal sob story," he yammers in "Labor," and that's as close to a statement of purpose as he comes.
  
  This would just be a mere parlor trick if it wasn't for the production, which is uniformly breathtaking. A string of icy arpeggios scramble up the center of "Save Yourself," Aes presciently advising: "The next time you want to be a hero, try saving something other than hip-hop." "Flashflood" is mercilessly grim, an inside-out samurai song where pan flutes crash up against swift, stabbing bass lines. And then, of course, there's "Daylight," the monolithic genre-defining song that none of Aes' disciples have come anywhere close to besting. "While the triple sixers lassos keep angels roped in the basement/ I walk the block with a halo and a stick, poking your patience," he announces over that fantastically blunted organ loop. All this time later, that prodding remains just as insistent, just as fantastically unsettling.

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#56 Pop detritus, looped and made new all over again

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  From Here We Go Sublime by The Field Pick

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  Whereas so much contemporary electronic music makes do largely with synthesizers, drum machines and software, Kompakt's roots lie firmly in sampling. Sweden's Axel Willner, aka the Field, takes the idea of stretching pre-recorded sounds to extremes: "A Paw in My Face," for instance, loops a smidgen or two of acoustic and electric guitar from Lionel Richie's "Hello" into a slow, ecstatic exhalation. Only at the song's end does it uncurl enough to reveal its source (and even then, only if you really, really know the song). All the tracks on the album proceed via the same conceit: find a juicy morsel hidden in a pop song's elbow crook, then loop and smear it until it takes on the dimensions of a mother-of-pearl Montana sunset. Backwards guitars trace arcing shapes in "Silent"; shuddering repetitions prod unabashed yearning on the unabashedly trancy "Everyday" and "The Deal" (the latter which almost certainly samples the Cocteau Twins, an idea as obvious as it is genius, and vice versa). "Over the Ice," meanwhile, is a perfect marriage of sound and image: the Field may be a one-trick pony, but here it wins the Triple Crown, and then some.

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#55 Chan sings her sorrow on these skeletal rockers and bare-tree ballads

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  You Are Free by Cat Power Pick

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  In interviews, Chan Marshall insists her songs come to her from dreams and the air surrounding her. There's no questioning the dreamlike quality of her best work — where subtle, haunting melodies are backlit with spare piano and elemental guitar — and there's no denying that whatever space she occupies, she completely takes over. This is one moody woman.
  
  You Are Free was Marshall's first collection of original material in five years, and it rushes forth in a briskly moving stream-of-consciousness, no matter how slow the actual tune in question. Special guests include Pearl Jam's Eddie Vedder (background vocals), Nirvana/Foo Fighters' Dave Grohl (drums, three tracks) and producer Adam Kasper, who twirls the knobs for a slightly brighter hue. But they're mostly a cheering section. The real focus is the songwriting, which remains eerily private, whether it's concerning the music business ("I Don't Blame You," "Free") or child abuse ("Names"). Marshall sings with a quiet desperation and honesty — and often in angelic, multi-tracked stereo — that makes it seem as if you're not actually hearing these thoughts but reading her mind.

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#54 Jimi Hendrix meets Talking Heads in the heart of the Congo

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  Congotronics by Konono No.1 Pick

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  "The street has its own uses for technology," Neuromancer author William Gibson famously declared. And Konono No. 1's electrified likembé "thumb pianos" — bass, tenor and soprano — would fit comfortably alongside Gibson's fictitious Rastafarian rocketeers and database-residing voodoo deities. Formed in the late '70s by an electrician called simply Mingiedi, Konono take the traditional music of the Bazombe, a tribe living on the Angola-Congo border, combine it with modern Congolese dance music and give it an afro-punk twist. The group's sound is amplified well past the point of distortion with microphones fashioned from magnets found in abandoned cars. and the likembé are accompanied by percussion consisting of cooking pots, tin cans and more car parts. The resulting music resembles a cross between a New Orleans marching band, a village wedding combo and the Jimi Hendrix Experience.
  
  With its abrasive yet strangely compelling sound (which first appeared on a 1985 anthology of urban Zairean music), Konono No. 1 aren't necessarily trying to win friends outside their community. Their homemade PA system, designed to elevate the band above their neighborhood street sounds, is loud and distorted enough to wake the ancestors. The closest the group comes to a hook is the subtle likembé figure at the beginning of "Paradiso," the album's strongest track, above a thumping, quasi-disco beat. Congotronics demands surrender, and the longer cuts give you plenty of time to ramble around the group's thick, buzzing polyrhythms, untranslated chants and unexpected changes. The group displays a mellower side in "Kule Kule," which of course makes everything else sound all the more wild, incessant and wonderfully unlikely.

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#53 A stunning document of an innovator at work

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  Sound Grammar by Ornette Coleman Pick

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  Ornette Coleman’s first new album in a decade, Sound Grammar, documents the iconic alto-sax maverick’s stunning current band, an all-acoustic group with two bassists, at a German concert on October 14, 2005. This particular album is less about pushing in new directions and more about acknowledging and extending the strengths that have shaped Coleman's style from the very beginning: melodic generosity, a healthy disregard for rules and, always, a deep blues feel at the core of his conception. The strongest attraction here, really, is the powerful performances that this particular band produces.
  
  Bowing his instrument in classical style, Tony Falanga provides keening accompaniment and vigorous counterpoint to the leader’s bluesy ebullience; Greg Cohen (Tom Waits, John Zorn), anchors the band with his rock-steady pulse. Denardo Coleman, the saxophonist’s son, remains an idiosyncratic drummer, but he’s at his best here. The set includes familiar numbers such as “Sleep Talking,” “Song X” and the classic “Turnaround,” but close watchers will also recognize a few more recent tunes presented here under new names. A miraculously clear recording by Chris Agovino lays clear every strand in the quartet’s intricate weave. With this release, Coleman assumes control of his artistic destiny with the establishment of his own label. With any luck, we'll see Coleman albums more frequently than we have in recent decades.

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#52 A fractured, funky, folky, jammy dispatch from a great, uncategorizable band

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  Roots & Crowns by Califone Pick

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  If civilization endures, Roots and Crowns will have at least a few 24^th-century musicologists tearing their hair out — in a good way, of course. Califone's seventh album finds mastermind Tim Rutili (ex-Red Red Meat) and company blithely marrying fractured funkadelia, twisted pan-global folk and Grateful Dead-like instrumental interplay in a slow-burning blaze of laptop-assisted glory that salutes apparently disparate traditions even as it consumes them. Gliding on a carpet of vaguely Middle Eastern percussion, opener "Pink and Sour" charms our inner cobra with pulsating drones and slide guitar that overlay Natchez and Mumbai like projector transparencies. "Black Metal Valentine" nudges its glitches into the realm of artficial life, myriad guitar-sourced scrapes gamboling the night away in a gentle digital vortex. And while Rutili's consistently wistful vocals often add an ironic gloss to his neo-Dada lyrics, they elevate the Psychic TV cover "Orchids" so effectively that Genesis P-Orridge would probably give all his piercings just to match it.

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#51 The greatest indie-rock document of adulthood in existence

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  And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out by Yo La Tengo Pick

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  After years as one of indie rock's standard-bearing groups, Yo La Tengo surpasses itself with And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out. A culturally literate, emotionally rich album, on songs like "Let's Save Tony Orlando's House," "The Crying of Lot G," and "The Last Days of Disco," it alludes to The Simpsons, enigmatic author Thomas Pynchon and independent films while exploring the comforting, confining, complex aspects of relationships. "Our Way to Fall" sets Ira Kaplan's recollection of falling in love to a dreamy, down-to-earth backdrop of gently brushed drums, luminous organs and vibes; "The Crying of Lot G" transforms the syrupy sweetness of '50s ballads into a monologue about a relationship's shortcomings. "Madeline"'s shimmery indie bossa-nova and the countrified ballad "Tears Are in Your Eyes" showcase Georgia Hubley's buttery, empathetic voice; her singing makes these vignettes universal as well as personal. Like mature indie rock records such as Pavement's Terror Twilight and Jim O'Rourke's Eureka, And Then Nothing... favors mellow songwriting, detailed arrangements, and eclectic influences, such as the Silver Apples-like drum machines and doo wop backing vocals that adorn many of the songs. The wintry, implosive "Everyday" uses both of these elements, along with a plaintive guitar and hushed, hypnotic vocals, to begin the album on a surprisingly somber note. Similarly, the off-kilter beats, odd piano bursts, and harmonies on "Saturday" add to the song's awkward, uneasy beauty. Finally, nine songs into the album, Yo La Tengo breaks out the whammy and feedback action on "Cherry Chapstick," their most incandescent song since "Sugarcube." Easily one of 2000's most accomplished albums, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out isn't as immediate as some of the group's earlier work, but it's just as enduring, proving that Yo La Tengo is the perfect band to grow old with.

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#50 Indie-rock stalwarts' moving story of love

#49 Haunting, spellbinding: still waters run deep

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  Time (The Revelator) by Gillian Welch Pick

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  In retrospect, this record's darker themes seem to echo with the gravity of 9/11, though in fact it was released a few weeks before that fateful day. Coincidental prescience aside, Time (The Revelator) stands as Gillian Welch's crowning achievement to date, loaded with emotionally resonant lyricism lit afire by the brilliant musicianship of her partner David Rawlings. Previous albums proved Welch's mastery of traditional form and feel; on Revelator, she and Rawlings struck a more personal chord of artistic expression. The result, from the spellbinding title-track opener to the epic 14-minute closer "I Dream a Highway," firmly established the duo as one of the major talents of their generation.

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#48 The laptop-folk-jazz of your digital dreams

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  Rounds by Four Tet Pick

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  2003's Rounds represents the perfect synthesis of Four Tet's — aka Kieran Hebden's — multiple and seemingly irreconcilable musical loves. Hebden's instrument is the computer, yet here he finds a way of feeding into it those most machine-unfriendly of contrasting genres, free jazz and folk. Previously, he had been accused of picking and mixing elements from his record collection. On Rounds, however, he creates a matrix of activity, in which the computer dices, filters and figures out impossible loops and pulses; the jazz elements maintain their jamming spontaneity and insistence on the right here, right now, and the beautiful folk elements maintain their absent reverie. It's some achievement. There's scarcely a duff or lazily repeated moment here amid these hanging sound gardens of fast-fingered gamelan waterfalls, broken beats and unexpected injections of musique concrete. Particularly outstanding, however, are the diaphanous "Spirit Fingers," the controlled, digital frenzy of "Hands" and the stately, episodic "My Angel Rocks Back and Forth."

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#47 Third-wave ska goes prep, with enormous results

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  Vampire Weekend by Vampire Weekend Pick

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  This quartet of recent Columbia University alumni pick up as much press for their boat shoes and for being social-networking hype-cycle poster children as for their lyrics about French architecture and serial commas and commuting from New England. But their biggest selling point is their incorporation of African and Caribbean guitar and drum lilts into baroque indie pop-rock — alternately lifted by roller-rink keyboards and chamber-group string cheese.
  
  Not the easiest pursuit to pull off: “This feels so unnatural/ Peter Gabriel, too” goes one line in the instructively titled “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa.” But sifting the global appropriations through ‘80s British pop helps. “A-Punk” follows ska hooks from the English Beat’s “Best Friend” with polite gang shouts; “The Kids Don’t Stand a Chance” walks on the moon like the early Police; “One (Blake’s Got a New Face)” mashes “Another One Bites the Dust,” New Order and the electric slide into a rhythmic call-and-response. And Ezra Koenig’s drama-club diction can be endearing, especially when the melody’s as sweet as in “Walcott,” about escaping Cape Cod. Not shy about rhyming “campus” with “romances,” Vampire Weekend almost convince you they’re the only living college boys in New York. Paul Simon would be proud: So long Frank Lloyd Wright, hello Mansard roofs.

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#46 Ryan Adams' masterpiece?

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  Heartbreaker by Ryan Adams Pick

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  After three albums with cultishly adored alt country troupe Whiskeytown, it was widely appreciated that Ryan Adams was a smart, literate songwriter and a distinctive singer. However, Heartbreaker, Adams' 2000 solo debut, marked the moment at which the artists he'd already been compared to — Bob Dylan, Paul Westerberg, Steve Earle, Gram Parsons — began to seem less like useful reference points and more like Adams' peer group.
  
  Though Heartbreaker was only the beginning of what has been a prolific and enthralling solo career, it seems some way more than likely that it will be recalled as Adams' masterpiece. Every note and breath here is suffused with swaggering confidence. The album's weird start — an obscure argument about Morrissey with collaborator David Rawlings, followed by a false start to the opening track — can only be intended to evoke Dylan's double-take on "Bob Dylan's 115th Dream." The song that follows, the swinging bluegrass romp "To Be Young," doesn't disgrace the association.
  
  It is, though, a somewhat misleading opening bid. The rest of Heartbreaker is a match for the title, a collection of exquisitely mournful ballads to which Adams' careworn croon catalogues the wreckage of a relationship, and articulates with wracking plausibility the ensuing derangement. "Why Do They Leave?," "Winding Wheel" and "Oh My Sweet Carolina" — the last of which is haunted by Emmylou Harris's backing vocals — are impeccable examples of the sort of monologues that the deserted deliver to indifferent bartenders. "Come Pick Me Up" and "Damn, Sam (I Love A Woman That Rains)," meanwhile, are gorgeous, wry exercises in doing what country music does best: wringing comedy, bleak though it may be, from tragedy.

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#45 A knife-cold, scalpel-sharp document of nihilism — with amazing beats

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  Hell Hath No Fury by Clipse Pick

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  To the uninitiated this may sound like hyperbole, but a simple first-time scan of its twelve tracks should be proof enough: there's not a single weak beat on Hell Hath No Fury.
  
  Part of that is down to the album's brevity: no skits where the jokes went stale before the tape stopped rolling; no sensitive b-boy cops to the quiet storm demographic, backed up by some generic R&B crooner of the moment; no half-assed attempts at fusions with pop, country or rock. Just a dozen mid-tempo, menacing bangers that buzz and squeal with a weird, ugly energy — synthetic soundtracks for idling in a big car and shooing passersby with your bass-bin fuzz.
  
  The other key to Fury's all-killer-no-filler success is its producer list: the Neptunes. That's it. In a decade when hip-hop albums became all-star dog's dinners, with a half-dozen or more big-name producers contributing beats with wholly incompatible vibes, this one-trackmaster line-up gives Fury a coherence that makes it listenable from-end-to end. It helps that the album also served as a delivery system for the Neptunes' last batch of truly great, truly strange beats (so far). Calling them "stark" makes these barely-embellished rhythms seem too bustling and full of life. They're free of traditional hooks, often downright unfriendly, but never less than attention-grabbingly inventive in their combinations of clonking percussion and sinister synth drones. It's a sonic world where even a smeared burst of goofy organ ("Momma I'm So Sorry") sounds like a seriously bad day at the circus.
  
  As for Clipse themselves, Malice and Pusha T continue to rap about one thing on their second official full-length — the procurement and distribution of cocaine, plus the pleasures and pains of the dealer lifestyle — but these one-dimensional, swaggering caricatures fit the Neptunes' cyber-pulp backdrops just about perfectly. A rapper could only get away with dropping a cringer of a pun like "the sounds of crackness" or calling himself the "black Martha Stewart" over a beat as deliciously weird, and weirdly funky, as "Ride Around Shining," where Audio Two lends its sidewalk-splitting rhythm box to John Carpenter. This is body-rock suitable for a grindhouse-grade horror flick. And the double-entendre, pusher-punning hook of "Keys Open Doors" is a little too on-the-nose, but it does even "Shining" one better with its truly eerie choral backdrop, perfect should any director decide to do a rap-centric Omen remake.

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#44 We call this stuff "diabolically clever." So watch out.

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  Mass Romantic by The New Pornographers Pick

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  A recording side project that became a real band because this album was so damn great: supercharged pop songs by Carl Newman and Destroyer's Dan Bejar, and ultra-high-energy performances by a band including alt-country singer Neko Case.

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#43 Gripping tales from the haunted south

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  The Dirty South by Drive-By Truckers Pick

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  The Dirty South was practically the third double-album in four years the Drive-By Truckers, its 14 tracks and 70 minutes following 2003's 15-song Decoration Day and the band's 2001 epic Southern Rock Opera. Having three strong songwriters helped: Relative newcomer Jason Isbell contributed four cuts here, most notably the dramatic closer “Goddamn Lonely Love”; lead guitarist Mike Cooley wrote four others, with frontman Patterson Hood penning the other six. Each of them has a distinctive voice, both vocally and verbally, but it all meshes remarkably well, in part because all three share a penchant for storytelling via cultural reference-points, from Isbell's “Danko/Manuel” (a nod to the late greats of The Band) to Cooley's “Carl Perkins' Cadillac” (a run through Sun Records' glory days) to Hood's “Buford Stick” (one of two songs that reference Walking Tall film icon Buford Pusser). The high point is Hood's desperate falsetto in “Puttin' People On The Moon,” a tour de force of the down-and-out Southern working-class.

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#42 Colonel Gaddafi-trained guerrillas-turned-troubadours get funky

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  Aman Iman: Water Is Life by Tinariwen Pick

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  OK, I’ll fess up: I only discovered Mali’s Tinariwen after Robert Plant raved about them in an interview four years back. But the nomadic desert blues collective has in fact existed in some form or other since 1979, their impassioned, highly politicised sound an issue-raising catalyst for the Tuareg people of the southern Sahara long before someone pulled a Ry Cooder and helped record their wonderfully stirring music for consumption outside of Africa.
  
  On Aman Iman — as on their "official" 2001 debut The Radio Tisdas Sessions — that person is producer Justin Adams, the multi-instrumentalist and erstwhile Wayward Sheiks member who is also a member of Robert Plant’s current band, the Strange Sensation. Adams does an excellent job, acting as facilitator, not meddlesome shaper.
  
  This time out, Tinariwen has made a fabulously skewed blues album that restores a winning exoticism to that oft-heard genre. The return of near-mythic founding member Mohamed Ag Itlale after six years in the desert (and you can take that quite literally) proves memorable, his improvised poetry on “Ahimana” intoxicating even if, like me, you don’t understand a word of his native tongue.
  
  Gritty and wholly involving, the album is a delicious tangle of snaking Malian guitars, Möbius strip-like rhythms, fat bass, clanking percussion and call-and-response chanting. The hypnotic pulse of “Cler Achel” is such that resistance is futile, while “Tamatant Tilay” further underlines Tinariwen’s status as lords of the feral dance. But there are also gentler moods, the meditative-sounding “Izarar Tenéré” so soothing that it’s easy to forget that the members of Tinariwen are in fact fearsome, Colonel Gaddafi-trained guerrillas-turned-troubadours.
  
  Word is that the final mix of the album had to be submitted for the approval of the Tuareg tribal elders, and that band percussionist Said Ag Ayad ferried it to them by camel. Now, how cool is that?

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#41 Confessional pop, with a DayGlo new wave flare

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  Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer? by of Montreal Pick

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  Hissing Fauna is the third fantastic album in a row from Athens, GA, pop band Of Montreal, but this time the band departs from the previous formula of '60s psychedelic storytelling for more confessional lyrics set with a DayGlo new wave flare. Bandleader Kevin Barnes sings of his sad-sack adventures in a breathy, eager voice with falsetto used liberally for faux-sassy ironic commentary. Find him telling tales of Norway as an electronics-only Talking Heads ("A Sentence of Sorts in Kongsvinger"), rejecting a suitor who lacks "soul power" in an indie pop monologue ("Bunny Ain't No Kind of Rider") and looking for a guru in the church of DFA Records ("Gronlandic Edit"). Put on the 12-minute "The Past Is a Grotesque Animal," a goth-tinged and psychosexually-charged dance track, and let Barnes take over the room with his unique, head-trip approach to stereo production.

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#40 Conor's masterpiece — stirring, emotional, profound

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  LIFTED or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground by Bright Eyes Pick

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  When Bright Eyes brainchild Conor Oberst issued Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground in August 2002, he was 22 years old. Critics were already calling him the "indie Bob Dylan," but the new millennium had seen a lot of those introverted, intelligent types (Ryan Adams, Beck). Bright Eyes, though, delivered a solid, intricately produced album without the majors' monotony. Immediately, one can sense Oberst's literate approach. His vocal curdle is abrasive yet warm. It's similar to the cooing of Robert Smith, but lush in heartache like Paul Westerberg, leaving the storybook of Lifted or The Story to earn massive praise. "Waste of Paint" is rough-cut with edgy acoustics, while "From a Balance Beam" glows with pop-like optimism. Chimes and simple drumming keep the story of personal insecurity and the fear of the unknown coming alive in a dreamy sort of way. Even when he's aching his way through the pop rumble of "Method Acting," Bright Eyes convincingly lures one into his eclectic musical world. Oberst obviously has the talent to support the hype. "Lover I Don't Have to Love" is a dark number with its Radiohead-like doom and gloom; however, the piano swirl of "A Bowl of Oranges" offers a brighter reflection. On Lifted or The Story Is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground, Bright Eyes has mixed badness with beauty for a sonic storybook that relates to everyone. It's slightly overwhelming at first, but one must allow a grace period to fully absorb the abstract desire behind this album.

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#39 Pure fire and passion from one of the decade's best rock bands

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  All Hands on the Bad One by Sleater-Kinney Pick

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  Sleater-Kinney switched gears on their follow-up to the challenging, introspective The Hot Rock, delivering their brightest, most accessible album to date with All Hands on the Bad One. That's partly due to a renewed assurance in craft -- the arrangements here are the most refined of the group's career, and their performances the most polished. Corin Tucker seems to be in complete command of her voice as an instrument, delivering her most nuanced vocal performance to date. Tucker and Carrie Brownstein's guitar interplay is up to their usual standard of intricacy, but instead of wildly careening off one another, the two mesh more seamlessly than they ever have. Plus, drummer Janet Weiss had been honing her skills as a backup vocalist, and the group makes full use of that extra instrument, packing the tracks with lilting three-part harmonies. Yet all of this craft and control shouldn't be taken as evidence that Sleater-Kinney has toned down the passion that makes them so exciting. Even if All Hands on the Bad One isn't as desperately cathartic as their previous records, there's a contagious exuberance in the performances, and the band is absolutely brimming with confidence and vitality. Though the record still covers serious political and emotional topics, its overall aura is best summed up in "You're No Rock n' Roll Fun," a bouncy, playful jab at snobby scenesters unable to remember the good times at the core of so much great rock & roll. Not only is All Hands on the Bad One Sleater-Kinney's most consistent overall set of songs since Call the Doctor, it's also evidence that the band has taken that philosophy to heart.

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#38 Indie rock's other lo-fi masterpiece

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  The Glow Part 2 by The Microphones Pick

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  If The Glow Pt. 2 were six or seven tracks shorter, it might rank with Neutral Milk Hotel's In the Aeroplane Over the Sea as one of the best indie-rock albums ever made. As it is, Phil Elvrum's masterpiece gets a bit lost across its twenty tracks — but only just a bit. Despite its lack of focus (the one criticism you can pin on Elvrum), The Glow Pt. 2 is magnificent, a heartbreaking album that sprawls and burrows, wet with tears and rain.
  
  If you are new to Phil Elvrum, a quick word on his aesthetic: lots of acoustic guitar layers that often sound like they are chasing their own shadows; he self-harmonizes a lot, but very loosely: syllables echo, words start and then start again as he finds his way to them; and his lyrics almost solely deal with longing and desire, pronounced gorgeously, and in a bucolic framework. Nature itself is often a character in his songs: Thoreau and Elvrum would have a lot to talk about.
  
  So, the best songs, then: "I'll Not Contain You" (light and airy), "Map" (beautiful and foreboding), "I Want Wind to Blow" (precious), "I Felt My Size" (stunning and obtuse) and "I Felt Your Shape" (even more stunning and even more obtuse). And then there's "You'll Be in the Air," one of Elvrum's best songs, and one of the best songs written for long-distance love ever (the Kinks' "Strangers" and "This Time Tomorrow" being the best), except maybe it's about a plane crash. The song closes, "You'll be in the air/ You'll bear fruit, your bare feet/ Your bare arms in the heat/ You'll be able to feel your might." It's a perfect canvas for hope and pining. And along with "I Felt Your Shape" and much of The Glow Pt. 2, a perfect song for falling in love.

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#37 One of the weirder pop records you'll ever hear

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  Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes by TV On The Radio Pick

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  The quintessential Williamsburg band (both bassist Gerard Smith and singer Kyp Malone work/have worked at Bedford Ave. coffeeshop the Verb), TV on the Radio are almost a shoegazer pop band — their songs are a tug-of-war between fuzzed-out drones and U2-like melodies. Their debut album includes the breakthrough single "Staring at the Sun," which is half performed in a shrill falsetto, and a handful of songs (most notably "Ambulance") that feature what is perhaps best described as chop-shop harmonies — the doo-wop template mauled into a sound both soothing and coarse. One of the weirder pop records you'll hear.

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#36 Jittery new wave delivered with pure-hearted punk spirit

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  The Tyranny Of Distance by Ted Leo & The Pharmacists Pick

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  With his premiere release on Lookout Records, Ted Leo makes a significant creative leap forward from the body of his substantial catalog. By fusing the punk and retro-pop elements of his musical history with a noisy affection for '60s blues-rock formulas, The Tyranny of Distance showcases some of Leo's best songwriting to date. Laden with falsetto hooks and overtly romantic observations of the world, he is able to control combinations of aggression and sentiment and focus them into highly melodic expressions of pure emotion. Leo places himself next to songwriting greats such as Billy Bragg and Elvis Costello through lyrical wit and intelligence and with The Tyranny of Distance he proves that he is one of the most creative, forward thinking songwriters in the underground. [A Japanese version includes bonus tracks.]

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#35 Submerged emotions drawn up with guitar washes and computer voodoo

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  Harmony In Ultraviolet by Tim Hecker Pick

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  For his fourth full-length (and first for ambient mainstay, Kranky) it’s difficult to pinpoint just what makes Tim Hecker’s Harmony in the Ultraviolet such a high water mark in laptop music. There’s no paradigm shift (a la Christian Fennesz’s Endless Summer), no sweeping statement, just a tactile sense of craftsmanship. Both granular and grandiose, Hecker’s washes of guitar and computer voodoo evince a sedulous sense of flow. The aqueous imagery isn’t coincidental — HitUV feels oceanic, almost like the sentient body of water from the movie Solaris. Within its abstract waves and turbid depths lie submerged emotions, which Hecker deftly draws to the surface.

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#34 Fiona's boldest, most uncompromising art-pop missive yet

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  Extraordinary Machine by Fiona Apple Pick

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  Fiona Apple's career is marked by no shortage of public drama, which tends to overshadow the brilliance of her songwriting and the raw power of her voice. Extraordinary Machine, Apple's third album, is borne of a typically difficult scenario: It was initially shelved by her label, but after recordings helmed by longtime collaborator Jon Brion leaked to the internet, a second version of the album, produced by Mike Elizondo, was released in 2005.
  
  Understandably, many listeners have grown attached to the original Brion arrangements, but the finished recordings with Elizondo are remarkable, and in most respects outshine the earlier versions simply by keeping Apple's compositions clean and uncluttered. Notwithstanding the youthful angst of her debut, Apple had always been a rather mature songwriter, but Extraordinary Machine is a showcase for material displaying meticulous craft and a more adult perspective on romantic relationships. Though she still occasionally overwrites her lyrics, a large chunk of the album is divided between clever bon mots like "home is where my habits have a habitat" and impressive extended metaphors, as in a verse comparing the mining of diamonds to the futility of trying to break through to an indifferent lover in the slow-burning ballad "Red, Red, Red." She's never sounded more focused and clear-headed, and the result is a record that makes good on the promise of her debut while hinting at even better material in the years to come.

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#33 Perfect, strutting dance rock that would do Simon LeBon proud

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  Franz Ferdinand by Franz Ferdinand Pick

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  While the Darts of Pleasure EP proved that Franz Ferdinand had a way with equally sharp lyrics and hooks, and the "Take Me Out" single took their sound to dramatic new heights, their self-titled debut album offers the most expansive version of their music yet. From the first track, "Jacqueline," which begins with a brooding acoustic prelude before jumping into a violently vibrant celebration of hedonism, Franz Ferdinand is darker and more diverse than the band's previous work suggested. "Auf Ausche" has an unsettling aggression underneath its romantic yearning, its cheap synth strings and pianos underscoring its low-rent moodiness and ruined glamour. And even in the album's context, "Take Me Out" remains unmatched for sheer drama; with its relentless stomp and lyrics like "I'm just a cross hair/I'm just a shot away from you," it's deliciously unclear whether it's about meeting a date or a firing squad. The wonderfully dry wit the band employed on Darts of Pleasure's "Shopping for Blood" and "Van Tango" is used more subtly: the oddly radiant "Matinee" captures romantic escapism via dizzying wordplay. "Michael," meanwhile, is a post-post-punk "John, I'm Only Dancing," by equal turns macho and fey; when Alex Kapranos proclaims "This is what I am/I am a man/So come and dance with me, Michael," it's erotic as well as homoerotic. Love and lust make up a far greater portion of Franz Ferdinand than any of the band's other work; previously, Franz Ferdinand's strong suit was witty aggressiveness, and the shift in focus has mixed results. There's something a little too manic and unsettled about Franz Ferdinand to make them completely convincing romantics, but "Come On Home" has swooning, anthemic choruses guaranteed to melt even those who hate swooning, anthemic choruses. Fortunately, the album includes enough of their louder, crazier songs to please fans of their EPs. "Darts of Pleasure" remains one of the best expressions of Franz Ferdinand's shabby glamour, campy humor, and sugar-buzz energy, and "Tell Her Tonight," which debuted on the Darts of Pleasure EP, returns in a full-fledged version that's even more slinky, menacing, and danceable than the demo hinted it might be. And if Franz Ferdinand's aim has always been to get people dancing, then "Cheating on You"'s churned-up art punk and close, Merseybeat-like harmonies suggest some combination of slam dancing and the twist that could sweep dancefloors. Despite its slight unevenness, Franz Ferdinand ends up being rewarding in different ways than the band's previous work was, and it's apparent that they're one of the more exciting groups to come out of the garage rock/post-punk revival.

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#32 Isobel and Stuart get jaunty

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  The Life Pursuit by Belle and Sebastian Pick

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  Whatever you think of Belle and Sebastian, it's hard to disagree with the fact that the Scottish combo is not only remarkably consistent, but it's managed to evolve without cringe-inducing growing pains. B&S have pretty much shed their unbearably twee image, for instance, and without resorting to drastic measures, like recording with Max Martin or hiring stunt guests; instead, Stuart Murdoch and his gang have grown organically, each album building upon the previous one. The band even survived the 2003 departure of Isobel Campbell, whose cello-playing and mellifluous vocals were long thought to be an essential part of the B&S sound.
  
  This album, the follow-up to 2003's Dear Catastrophe Waitress and second without Campbell, has an undeniably jaunty bounce, but B&S are hardly dance floor kings — it's the arrangements rather than the beats that sneak in sly funky/soul touches. "Sukie in the Graveyard" is buoyed by a bopping organ and subtle horns, for instance, while the clavinet intro to "Song for Sunshine" nods toward classic Stevie Wonder, before the song takes a turn into Sly and the Family Stone territory. But the overall mood is that of a paen to late-'60s/early-'70s sunshine pop ("We Are the Sleepyheads," "White Collar Boy" and its shuffling, delicately glammy Backbeat, "The Blues Are Still Blue" and its little "96 Tears"-like organ coda).
  
  So yes, it's yet another B&S album, but it's also yet another good B&S album. Any complaints?

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#31 Drone-pop goes gorgeous and playful

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  Beach House by Beach House

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  Beach House is a lovely, unassuming straight pop record played as drone by Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand, two nice folks from Baltimore. On a strictly aesthetic level, Beach House fits neatly into the well-heeled drone/dream-pop lineage, from "I'm Only Sleeping" to the Byrds circa 1967-68 to The Velvet Underground to My Bloody Valentine to Mazzy Star to Fennesz to some kid's bedroom in suburban Florida's well-mulched cul-de-sacs.
  
  Drone/dream-pop/space-rock/whatever you wanna call it is a defiantly middle-class music: a quaint, privileged rebellion against the blacks and whites of the day-to-day bustle, against the expectations of parents, responsibility and life, a longing stare into a safer and softer version of this spinning orb, a space without hardened edges, lights, opinions or ends. With its meditative pauses (it's all pause, really), it's basically the musical equivalent of that post-high school year in Europe, only rather than self-discovery in a German youth hostel, it's salvation through the hum of an EBow.
  
  What's truly wonderful about Beach House, then, is how fully Scally and Legrand embrace their own class. Whereas many records bearing these same hazy production touchstones shroud themselves in filters of soft white noise and an allergic reaction to melody — perhaps to deny the mores of music they reject — Beach House puts its beauty center stage, Legrand's voice Nico-like in tone, belabored enunciation and forcefulness. (Unlike Nico, though, you can actually understand all of the words on first listen, a nice touch!) Some of the melodies are shockingly flirtatious and almost soul-like, such as "Master of None," one of the album's best songs and a mix-tape essential — Casanovas take note!
  
  In "Master of None," Legrand's voice twinkles with a playful lilt not far from something Smokey Robinson might have written. And then there's that great opening couplet, drawing a line (I think) between using "bird" to refer to women and the singles game: "You always go to the parties/To pluck the feathers off phone numbers." Now, that's clever (I think). "Master" is definitely the track to start with, but not where you should stop: "Apple Orchard," "Childhood" and "Tokyo Witch" in particular are truly wonderful.

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#30 Exotic, eerie, richly melodic, and unforgettable

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  Actor by St. Vincent Pick

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  Annie Clark (aka St. Vincent) made an auspicious debut with 2007's Marry Me, the title of which (inspired by a running joke on Arrested Development) drew puppyish affirmatives from fans of this unconventional experimentalist with the photogenic gamine looks. If that record hinted at a taste for sonic invention beyond the palate of most singer-songwriters, her second album is a full-blossoming. Challenging, startling and, at times, plain awkward, Actor at first intrigues then gradually captivates. It's both brave and beautiful.
  
  The Texas-raised, Brooklyn-based Clark, a figure in the local Sufjan Stevens/the National scene and onetime member of the Polyphonic Spree, has requisitioned worthy guest musicians. Woodwind is supplied by Alex Sopp (Philip Glass, Björk) and Hideaki Amori (Sufjan Stevens), while McKenzie Smith and Paul Alexander of Midlake bring ballast as the rhythm section. There are French horns, violins, multiple percussionists. She co-produces with John Congleton (Polyphonic Spree, Modest Mouse). Yet for all the acquired kudos and busy arrangements, what stands out primarily is St. Vincent's own personality. The voice may be soft and reticent, yet the identity — comprised of lyrics, attitude, a willfully perverse jumbling of ideas and compositional tropes — is confident and compelling.
  
  Clark claims her muses for Actor were films ranging from Disney to Godard, and you can discern the influence of The Wizard of Oz (a favourite of hers) in the sweet/sinister interplay here. Throughout the journey, you can sense both the cold radicalism of Bowie‘s Heroes and the warmer pioneer moves of Kate Bush circa The Dreaming. "The Strangers" opens like a cinematic elegy, before a wave of distorted glitching lets us know that this questing Dorothy‘s yellow brick road will not be without its flying monkeys. The rumbling gravitas of the National and the hyperactivity of Animal Collective inform the outstanding "Actor Out Of Work," which is simultaneously pining and aggressive. "Marrow" comes off like a restless mix of Morricone and the MC5.
  
  Clark enters a more mellow, restrained mood for the closing section, which are voice and piano led, but don't be fooled: like Bat For Lashes (or Lisa Germano), even her cuter melodies bear barbs. The angelic choir of "The Party" is contrasted by military-style drums. Nothing is ever one-dimensional.
  
  Like the films she loves, St. Vincent's multi-layered music rewards repeat visits. Actor may be one of the most exotic, eerie and evocative releases of the year.

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#29 A preconception-shattering classic of avant-jazz

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  Simulated Progress by Fieldwork Pick

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  Fieldwork stretch and in some instances shatter all notions regarding what constitutes both mainstream and avant-garde jazz, eschewing blues, ballads, hard bop and reconfigured show tunes. Pianist Vijay Iyer, alto saxophonist Steve Lehman and drummer Elliot Humberto Kavee craft intense, compelling and often startling music emphasizing collective interplay as much as, if not more than, free-wheeling instrumental monologues. Certainly pieces like Iyer's bustling "Headlong," which blends Asian music references and odd time signatures with gorgeous keyboard phrasing, or the magical "Telematic" that smartly combines slashing drumming, a swirling, declarative alto statement and more frenetic piano, embody the experimental sensibility of outside material. But all three players are both virtuoso soloists and great accompanists, and these pieces carefully balance individual contributions and group performances. The results are delightful and memorable, if often unorthodox.

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#28 Pure pop with all the radio frequencies ripped out

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  Merriweather Post Pavilion by Animal Collective Pick

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  With all apologies to the Stooges and "1969," it's now "2009 okay/ Across the USA/ Another year for me and you/ Another year with nothin' to do." But with the dawning of this new year comes renewed hope for our godforsaken country, our roughed-up economy, our tattered national reputation — and some new music, too. More reasons to be cheerful — and among them perhaps the first great album of the year, Merriweather Post Pavilion.
  
  What Noah "Panda Bear" Lennox, David "Avey Tare" Portner and Brian "Geologist" Weitz seem to have in mind for this release is to build a breadcrumb trail back to the band's altered-consciousness smasheroo, 2007's Strawberry Jam — but adding a pop twist. All of their by-now signature moves — the sunshine-stained Brian Wilson vocal chorales; the Bowie-meets-Eno-in the backseat of Kraftwerk's car drone-rock of indeterminate origin; the Phil Spectoresque wall of noiseadelic reverb coating each track like a film of about-to-be-put-to-good-use bubble-blowing soap; the lingering feeling that Yes hasn't officially released a new album in nearly a decade so perhaps this is them, under an assumed name? — are recognizably in evidence, but they're assembled in catchier, newfangled ways. Just check the flanged fabulosity and burbling bonghit samples of Lennox's "Bluish" ("I'm getting lost in your curls, all drawing pictures on your skin/so it twirls"), the airy, windblown sonic vistas and "I don't care for fancy things" populism of "My Girls," their latest in a series of arrhythmic, psychedelic odes to the waking dream ("Also Frightened:" "Will it be just like they're dreaming? Puddles that breathe, covered by leaves") and even a hot-weather anthem dedicated to sweating the girls in their scanty summer best (the deliberately eccentric and Krautrocking "Summertime Clothes," which bears nothing in common with any other rock 'n roll anthem about this subject, but proudly holds its own alongside them, anyway) and tell me you don't hear a band growing before your very ears.
  
  The album's eleven tracks form an interesting solid mass covering every conceivable corner of the pop universe, and end up feeling a bit like ten pounds worth of ideas stuffed carefully into a five-pound sack. Inherently this is a Very Good Thing (we should all suffer from the tyranny of too many ideas) but does rather neatly demonstrate the challenge Animal Collective faces in editing all their various brainstorms into a single/digestible whole. But on this release, it works; and wonderfully so.
  
  Ultimately, what emerges from Animal Collective's lab this time out is sort of an '00s update on Pink Floyd's Saucerful of Secrets: pure pop with all the radio frequencies ripped out, an album allowed to break free from the moorings of today's commercial vicissitudes and simply float in space on the merits of its melodies, musicality and moods. This statement isn't as pretentious a metaphor as it might initially read: back in the day, Pink Floyd was attempting a perilous career makeover, shifting from a band capable of rendering Syd Barrett's acid-flavored whims into three-minute bits of BBC-ready pop to a space-rock outfit capable of playing single chords/keys around a single thematic subject for what could sometimes amount to single sides of an entire album. What Animal Collective does here is basically start at Atom Heart Mother and go backward — the band has already perfected its "lost my shit in the blotter storm and can't get up" thing, so the only logical direction from here is to head back toward the light, where its Beach Boys fixation can make amends with its otherwise pronounced eccentricities. A perfect statement to kick off what promises to be perhaps the weirdest year we've seen in many a dark side of the moon.

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#27 Hymns of pain and power drawn from a palette of gender identity

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  I Am A Bird Now by Antony and the Johnsons Pick

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  You could say artist/musician/androgyne Antony has a certain flair for drama. Spirited by the tranny cabarets and gender-fucking performance artists that lured him to New York from California in the early '90s, Antony torches his piano with poignant songs of pain and power, alienation and acceptance, love and sorrow, all drawn from a palette of gender identity, the desire to be female never far from his thoughts. "One day I'll grow up/I'll be a beautiful woman," he promises on "For Today I Am a Boy" — and if that doesn't work, there's always surgery ("My Lady"). His melancholia is underscored by his swanlike, womanish tenor, which flutters, warbles and floats out in grand curlicues of vibrato, lifted high on a pedestal of piano and a small string section (which includes Joan As Policewoman violinist Joan Wasser). He also posses up the man-sopranos for guest spots, reminding us he's not the first pop singer flaunting his divaness; for "You are My Sister," he's joined by O.G. gender-queer pop star Boy George, while the loping "What Can I Do?" features Rufus Wainwright's clear croon; and neo-hippie hipster Devendra Banhart contributes on "Spiralling." I Am a Bird Now's real life longing is cradled in bouts of bittersweet fantasy and cushioned by hope; as such, Antony's theatricality never overpowers his humanity. "I am a bird-girl," he wails sadly on the closing track, "and bird-girls can fly!"

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#26 Feist-y collective fusses over the details

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  You Forgot It In People by Broken Social Scene Pick

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  A big group doesn't always make a big sound. Sprawling Toronto-based indie rock collective Broken Social Scene, whose ranks usually hover around nine instrument-hopping members, fuss over the details on You Forgot It In People, their breakthrough full-length. Rarely dipping outside traditional rock band instrumentation, BSS somehow make a bunch of guitar/bass/keyboard/drum tunes sound uniquely sparkly and sweet. The group sounds self-assured as members trade vocal duties and scuttle between galloping, raucous indie anthems ("KC Accidental," "Almost Crimes"), strutting, faux-tropical workouts ("Looks Just Like the Sun," "Pacific Theme") and swooning melodrama (album highlight "Lover's Spit").
  
  Rather than making an indiscriminately large racket, BSS use their bulging roster to fill the nooks and crannies of You Forgot with small sonic treasures. Layered guitars twinkle a little more when sidled-up next to a high harmony piano vamp; acoustic guitar and brushed drums are teased and textured by a winsome, dulcimer-like lead line; a plodding midtempo number is made soaring with subtle strings and a flanged, layered vocal harmony. It took every shred of every idea from the freewheeling group, but they managed the neat trick of using more to make less — luckily, it's a distinctly thrilling treat.

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#25 Better than "Illinoise." There, we said it.

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  Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State by Sufjan Stevens Pick

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  Sufjan Stevens's third album is a charming homage to his home state of Michigan. Filled with heartbreak, the album cryptically addresses Stevens' frustration with the notorious job market in the city of Flint in a lovely ballad that opens the record, and documents the depressing struggle the city of Detroit has fought to once again attain the elegance it had prior to the riots in the late '60s; however, it also touches on a brighter side, as in the cascading "Say Yes! to M!ch!gan!" Its title is a reference to the campaign adopted by the state in the 1980s and serves as the centerpiece as well as Stevens' attachment and amour for the state he is from. Musically, Stevens often plays his Jim O'Rourke and Stereolab cards, riffing along with complex polyphony in building loops and dynamics, but he also frequently imports lightly strummed guitars and stark banjo picking to break up the album and give it a rustic northern folk aesthetic. Stevens comfortably handles nearly every instrument on the album -- an impressive task that includes various keyboards, woodwinds, guitars, and percussions -- but also enlisted the help of Megan, Elin, and Daniel Smith from the Danielson Famile to help out with vocal duties, and the outcome is a haunting and hypnotic studio opus certainly worth getting lost in.

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#24 A potent encapsulation of Sheffield's bluff, no-nonsense attitude

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  Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not by Arctic Monkeys Pick

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  "Tonight there'll be a ruckus, regardless of what went before," predicts Arctic Monkeys' songwriter Alex Turner in "The View From The Afternoon," the opening track of the band's debut album, living up to his promise by taking us on a whirlwind tour of provincial teenage life as experienced in Britain today. It's effectively one long, extended fight, from rumbling with nightclub bouncers to getting slapped around by cops in the back of a riot van — a typical end to a typical evening in his hometown Sheffield, the staunchly left-wing northern industrial city laid low in the '80s when Thatcherite stringencies killed off the local coal and steel industries. But with his tales of Eccleshall phonies in Hunter's Bar and taxi-rides to Hillsborough, Turner invests his songs with a vivid sense of locality comparable to the coolest of American hip-hop 'hoods. That same strain of South Yorkshire pride comes through in the unapologetic dialect inflections he employs, and in the track title "Mardy Bum" (Sheffield-speak for "whinger"), which finds him chiding a girlfriend who's "got the face on."
  
  Sheffield's pop, like the city itself, has always been marked by a sardonic, rebellious artiness — previous exponents have included Pulp, ABC, Cabaret Voltaire and the Human League — and so it's no surprise to find Turner making Shakespearean reference to "Montagues and Capulets," or cynically observing that "there's only music so that there's new ringtones," or being singularly unimpressed by a nightclub show-off in the single "I Bet You Look Good On The Dancefloor." Or, indeed, calling the album Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not, a perfect encapsulation of the bluff, no-nonsense local attitude.
  
  Harnessed to a contemporary punk-pop sound infused with the scrawny, white-boy R&B feel of the early Stones, Who and Pretty Things, the result is the most potent release so far from the post-Libertines wave of British social-observation rockers, by a band that appreciates the value of taut discipline, but without sacrificing either the raucous edge that gives it life, or the artistry that illuminates that life.

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#23 An austere, wind-blasted dispatch from the loneliest continent

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  The Moon & Antarctica by Modest Mouse Pick

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  As if the idea of Modest Mouse on a major label wasn't subversive enough, the group's Epic debut, The Moon & Antarctica, features the creepiest car commercial jingle ever. Seriously now: did Nissan even listen to the profoundly sad "Gravity Rides Everything" before green-lighting its woozy tales of bad motels, saggy fruit flesh, spilled milk and sinking corpses? On a similar note, we're willing to bet that Modest Mouse's new home didn't expect them to deliver a disc that reeked of death and deception — a spacious and spooky listen brimming with brash arrangements (some songs even mess with experimental electronic music) and the many guises of Isaac Brock. (The frontman broke his jaw in the middle of the Moon sessions, but that didn't keep him from funneling his frayed nerves into a whole lotta hooting and hollering.)
  
  To truly understand what's achieved on this album, you might want to skip right to "The Stars Are Projectors," one of the most awe-inspiring epics in Modest Mouse's 15-plus years at the forefront of indie rock. Split into several movements, the song hits its stride six minutes in, as Jeremiah Green's percussion picks up speed alongside skittering synths and swift violin stabs. "The Cold Part" also drifts along in all the right places, maintaining a fog-like atmosphere for five minutes. All and all, it's not the most uplifting material, but we're happy to report that Modest Mouse's commercial 'breakthrough' is as sublime as this stuff gets.

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#22 Legendary hip-hop producer’s final solo album

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  Donuts by Jay Dee aka J Dilla Pick

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  The memorial T-shirts said it all: “J Dilla Changed My Life.” When Detroit producer James “Jay Dee” Yancey died this past February due to complications from lupus, he left behind an incredible, decade-long body of work, thousands of touched colleagues and fans and an otherworldly aesthetic that his disciples are still trying to wrap their heads around. Known for inventing the ticky-tack, negative-space approach to funk that came to define late-'90s neo-soul, the graceful, swooning loops and delicate chops of the sketchbook-like Donuts were a brief but tantalizing hint at Dilla’s next giant step. We’ll never know — and we’re probably incapable of imagining — what would have come next.

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#21 Bradford's most haunting batch of shoegaze koans

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  Microcastle by Deerhunter Pick

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  Deerhunter are either one of the toughest ambient bands or one of the most ambient tough bands you will ever come across; the difference hardly matters, because the group is so good at being both. After their gritty breakthrough in 2007 with Cryptograms and the wild charge of Deerhunter's increasingly storied live shows, the initial hush and softness of Microcastle might come as a surprise. In "Agoraphobia," Bradford Cox sings softly over guitars that ring and chime almost like R.E.M. This being Deerhunter, though, that mood proves deceiving; the ring quickly takes on sinister tones and Cox gets to singing, with an eerie stoic desperation, "I had a dream no longer to be free/ I want only to see four walls made of concrete."
  
  There's a lot of fantasizing about freedom and constraint here, both in the lyrics and in the strangely nervy take on shoegaze that Deerhunter have made their métier. "Little Kids" offers a comely melody that builds and builds into a vaporous din, and "Nothing Ever Happened" (one the best songs of this year, by far) launches into a raucous motorik krautrock jam, sending out frayed signals of hooks in glimmers. On the whole, Microcastle proves more of a moaning koan than might have been expected, but the intensity starts to bear out with repeated listens, yielding plenty of opportunities to get haunted

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#20 Underground hip-hop's grimy ground zero

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  The Cold Vein by Cannibal Ox Pick

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  Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein blew indie hip-hop wide open in 2001, collapsing the false distinction between “street” and “backpack” rap way before Kanye (and with way different results). Vast Aire and Vordul combined Raekwon’s airtight, stressed-out crime dramas with crackpot Egyptology (“Pigeon”), Marvel Comics pulp (“Battle for Asgard,” possibly the first time African-American rappers referenced Norse mythology) and even a little emo (“The F-Word”). But for all the duo’s rhyme virtuosity and brutalist detail — “You was a stillborn baby/ Your mother didn’t want you/ But you were still born/ Boy meets world/ Of course his pops is gone” — it was El-P’s production that really flipped conservative indie wigs and garnered the duo attention outside of the rap world. At the same time that producers like Swizz Beatz were using high-gloss Casio keyboards to start the party, El-P was power sanding his beats and soaking his hooks in brine. El fashioned a wheezing machinefunk full of biting synth winds blowing through subway stops and sonic quotes from Wall of Voodoo’s “Mexican Radio.” The end result was a grimy classic of 21st-century NYC hip-hop that kicked off El’s well-regarded Def Jux imprint and that both rappers and producer have yet to top.

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#19 The steward of the peculiar's most brilliant, intimate dispatch

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  Destroyer's Rubies by Destroyer Pick

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  Dan Bejar, the driving force behind the Vancouver group Destroyer and occasional New Pornographer, has since 1996 built a career defined by eccentricity. Occasionally, his willful absurdism leads to aggravating dead ends. His 2004 record, Your Blues, was almost giddily difficult, the kind of record that delighted in its own artiness but never quite transcended it.
  
  Not so Destroyer's Rubies. The seventh and best Destroyer record, Rubies is as heavy with rock history as it is disgusted with the underground, a record that offers both ease of access and stockpiles of mystery. Before the album's nine-minute opening salvo is over, Bejar has referenced Otis Redding, "Golden Slumbers" and his own back catalog, his delivery alternately rushed and hesitant. From that point on, Rubies is a dizzying trip, a record that is both fat with facts and is also the perfect mirror of an age weary and bloated from instant access to vats of questionable knowledge.
  
  Musically, Rubies is loose and ramshackle, the elements sounding thrown together almost by chance. Piano melodies stumble drunk around slack guitar noodling and groaning saxophone. Bejar initially fumbles the signature riff of "3000 Flowers," but tightens it with each pass until the song explodes in a wild, triumphant crescendo. The loose barroom ballad "European Oils" is locked in a steady pattern of swelling and subsiding and the punchdrunk waltz "Looter's Follies" peaks with a ghostly choir bellowing from the shadows.
  
  The songs are stuffed with countless coy allusions to other albums, but they never feel arch or smug or deliberately clever. When Bejar duplicates the stammering guitar solo from Neil Young's "Down by the River," it's not so much snide cribbing as loving homage. He calls into question the tendency among music lovers to seek out messianic figures (at one point he has the American Underground sitting "cross-legged….much like churchgoers"), yet can barely contain his own fanaticism.
  
  There are so many layers of text and subtext and meta-text a person with enough time and wherewithal could probably use the record as the basis for a graduate thesis. As it is, though, Destroyer's Rubies is both majestic and rewarding. "Some situations need redressing/ And some songs just go 'Testing, Testing,'" he sings. It's this middle ground between meaning and emptiness that Rubies occupies. Trying to separate one from the other is just one of its many charms.

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#18 Another masterpiece from the patron saints of loneliness

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  In Rainbows by Radiohead Pick

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  "Don't get any big ideas," goes the first line of "Nude," the third song on Radiohead's haunting seventh record, "they're not gonna happen." This is, of course, hogwash — a willful bit of Thomfoolery designed to accentuate a theme by understating it. In Rainbows is a record full of big ideas, ideas about solitude and desertion and depression and dislocation — to say nothing of its notions about record distribution.
  
  And let's, please, say nothing of its notions about record distribution. For weeks after its arrival all anyone could talk about was how much (if anything) they paid for it, obscuring any discussion of what Rainbows actually is: a stunning sustained consideration of loneliness set to a somber, underplayed score.
  
  Musically, In Rainbows — like Hail to the Thief before it — finds Radiohead winding their way back towards something like conventional songwriting. That an album where the opener boasts jazz guitar, drum 'n' bass rhythms and bursts of cheering children can be considered even remotely "conventional" is a testament to how far afield Radiohead were before this. They're calmer now, constructing songs from blue bands of synthesizers and delicate, twinkling arpeggios. With the exception of the ragged "Bodysnatchers," which hurtles forward on the back of briny guitar, most of Rainbows is disturbingly serene. The songs maintain a kind of steady cruising altitude: "Faust Arp" threads solemn strings through Brit-folk finger-picking; "Jigsaw Falling Into Place" speeds along on galloping percussion and swooping, sine-wave guitars. It's a welcome reminder of how good Radiohead still are at writing plain old pop songs, even if those pop songs are full of ruminations on loss and mortality.
  
  Which, of course, is where Thom Yorke comes in. His writing has grown more direct — on In Rainbows he's fonder of plain old declaratives than on much of his past work — but most times that superficial glibness conceals a deep-seated unrest: "I don't want to be your friend," he sings at one point, "I just want to be your lover," a sentiment that sounds sexy until you realize what it means is that he's not going to call you the Day After. Ditto "All I Need," where he unspools a series of distressing pledges of devotion ("I'm an animal trapped in your hot car" is one) only to end up at "I only stick with you/ Because there are no others." Not the valentine everyone hopes to get.
  
  In the album's final scene, Yorke finds himself before God who, apparently as resistant to new technology as he is sin and death and canoodling, plays back Yorke's life for him on a VCR. As he is for most of Rainbows, Yorke is there by himself, but instead of rifling through his regrets, he has an eleventh hour epiphany. "This is one for the good days," he croons as the piano death-marches behind him, "And I have it all here in red, blue and green." It's a startling redemption, ending album-length isolation with the refrain, "I know today has been/ The most perfect day I've ever seen." This, to say the least, isn't what we were expecting. Where's the longing? Where's the dread? Where’s the hopelessness? Who's the wiseguy? What’s the big idea?

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#17 A pop icon, a persona and a genre come fully formed

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  Boy In Da Corner by Dizzee Rascal Pick

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  Boy In Da Corner accomplished many things all at once — mainstreamed the "grime" movement of London clubland; proved that rapping wasn't exclusively an American preserve; announced the arrival of a fully-formed pop icon, wise well beyond his 19 years.
  
  Dizzee Rascal's debut is relentless — the East Londoner raps at a frantic pace, whether his subject matter is urgent ("I Luv U," about teenage romance gone way, way wrong) or more lackadaisical ("Sittin' Here," in which the young MC muses on the twists and turns of his own imagination). "Round We Go" charts a dysfunctional relationship more accurately than Dr. Phil, and "Brand New Day" laments the violent turn in London street life: "We used to fight with kids from other estates/ Now 8-millimeters settle debates." As a producer, Dizzee is a truly gifted autodidact. He made much of the music for Boy... at his home studio, but the combination of ferocious dark-step and pealing digital synths doesn't show any seams. Before Jay-Z got around to it, Dizzee resurrected Billy Squier on the riotous anthem "Fix Up, Look Sharp." On the skittish "Vexed" (the bonus track on the album's American version), Dizzee details a troubled childhood and a life of fame that might be even more fraught: "At night I get a little less sleep than you think/ I feel more stress than you see." Most artists have difficulty capturing the scale of the universe over a career's worth of albums; Dizzee Rascal does it in just one song.

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#16 The sound of aging, regretting and moving on

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  Alligator by The National Pick

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  This Cincinnati-to-Brooklyn five-piece's third album continues its quest to capture the blue mood of eternal night. Once closer in line to the alt-country scene, the National have since combined Tindersticks, Nick Cave, Lee Hazlewood and Echo and the Bunnymen to achieve incredible musical and compositional growth. There's an epic quality to these songs. Singer Matt Berninger keeps a fatalist watch on that heart of his, and the downcast orchestration of "All the Wine," with its cascading notes of windblown raindrops, and the halting shuffle behind the elliptical melody of "Karen" only heighten the drama of his dark stories and soothing baritone. The voice is a natural come-on, but his tales are far too dejected, too paranoid (the album's opening line is: "I think this place is full of spies") to settle for being just another beautiful loser

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#15 The molten, visionary sound of hip-hop in this century and the next

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  Stankonia by Outkast Pick

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  Critics are quick to praise Speakerboxx/The Love Below as OutKast's defining statement, but in truth their musical epiphany arrived three years earlier. Stankonia is a sprawling masterpiece, an album full of greasy, rotting funk, acrobatic vocals and deft, nimble rhymes. It seemed at times beamed in from another planet, weird laser-beam keyboards boring holes into broad, beefy bass lines and screwball vocal effects making its key players sound like ghosts and goblins. But what on the surface could easily pass for a simple party record gradually reveals itself to be brimming with anger and frustration. The album opens with Andre 3000 howling "Does everybody like the smell of gasoline? Burn, motherfucker, burn American dreams!" over an epileptic funk guitar; its volcanic, would-be party anthem is called "Bombs Over Baghdad" and is built around the chorus, "Don't pull that thing out unless you plan to bang/ And don't even bang unless you plan to hit something." Even the apology at the center of "Ms. Jackson" bears the acrid sting of resentment ("I apologized a trillion times!") OutKast match Sly Stone's willingness to fiddle with the boundaries of funk, writing songs that are experimental and elastic, snide and sinister.

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#14 A brilliant two-hour tour through one of the richest of musical eras

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  Nigeria Special: Modern Highlife, Afro-sounds & Nigerian Blues 1970-76 by Various Artists Pick

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  Some compilations that highlight a particular sound during a particular time follow a straight line. But when that time and place is as relatively under-documented as early ’70s Nigerian pop, such tidiness isn’t so necessary — it’s enough to just crack the door and to keep it open for an enticing while. That’s why Nigeria Special, a brilliant two-hour tour through a musical world that ranged far more widely than even a serious fan of this era and place might have been aware, is such a triumph. Covering the period just after the Biafran War (1967-70) had ended, Nigeria Special concentrates on the region’s late highlife and the post-Fela Kuti fallout of Afrobeat — Kuti was an exemplar of the style, but by no means the sole model of success. If that means the collection’s focus blurs a little, that’s more than made up for the sheer breadth, range and intrigue on display here.
  
  Many of Nigeria Special’s cuts are so juicy it’s impossible to believe they’ve never been made available outside of Nigeria before. The Funkees’ “Akula Owu Onyeara” — originally released in two parts, and edited together here for the first time — works like Fela at his most rhythmically sinuous; the simple keyboard figures could be Morse Code signal for uncut funk, and it has one of the most perfect endings you’ll ever hear. George Akaeze & His Augmented Hits’ “Business Before Pleasure” is delectably light-footed Afrobeat with laconic chants and jazzy horns so friendly they belie the title: this is business as pleasure. The nonstop forward motion of the Semi Colon’s “Nekwaha Semi Colon” is formally disco — the hi-hat/kick-drum pattern points right at it — but it’s so hypnotic it seems rooted in something far older (and more intrinsically Nigerian). The highlife tracks are equally hot: St. Augustine & His Rovers Dance Band’s “Onwu Ama Dike” is made even lovelier by its slightly messy rhythmic feel, not to mention the semi-sweet horn line.
  
  Compiler Miles Cleret claims that there are thousands more such goodies that have just been sitting in Nigeria waiting to be rediscovered. The 26 included here are such a pleasure to listen to that, for anyone who loves them, they could inspire fantasies of booking a flight to Lagos and starting a treasure hunt of one’s own.

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#13 Iceland's Best Album of the Century. No really, that's a genuine award

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  Agaetis Byrjun by Sigur Ros Pick

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  In retrospect, it's actually surprising that this album wasn't bigger. In 2000, an Icelandic trio called Sigur Rós cooed new age into the indie rock mainstream with Ágætis Byrjun, a contemplative collection that steers between gorgeous whale music ("Svefn-g-englar") and post-Enigma Europop ("Starálfur" and "Ný batterí"). Certainly the glacial pace and nonsense lyrics (sung in a made-up language) place some limits on its reach, but by and large Sigur Rós' music is intensely accessible, with emotionally naked cinematic flourishes pacing the compositions. There are tentative dabbles into jazz and Radiohead-style art-rock, but by and large this is a smart and progressive new age album that even the kids can dig.

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#12 The legendary D.C. band's greatest album

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  The Argument by Fugazi Pick

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  If the Ian MacKaye and Guy Picciotto of 13 Songs and Repeater had been offered a glimpse into their future, it's hard to tell how they would have reacted. Would MacKaye have recognized his own voice, softened with age? How would Picciotto feel about Fugazi's shift from strident punk-rock to relatively subtle post-hardcore? The evolution is not total, certainly — the verses to The Argument's "Full Disclosure" could have appeared on Red Medicine — but the bookends to The Argument, arguably Fugazi's finest album, are striking in their subtleties and intricacy.
  
  "Cashout," which basically sets the stage for all that MacKaye has done with his excellent other band, the Evens, could only come from DC. It strongly recalls the early work by neighbors Q & Not U, for example, and the push and pull between the verses (where MacKaye's tense voice at times hums along with the backing guitars) and the chorus (unleashed, but still with cello buttressing the melody) just straight slays; drummer Brendan Canty's little snare stutter-beat and Joe Lally's head-nodding bass line make it almost funk-like. There's never been another song like it in the Fugazi discography.
  
  Then there's "Life and Limb," Picciotto pirouetting on the apocalypse, again the rhythm section incredibly tight and restrained, matching Picciotto's breathy sighs in self-discipline. A sense of maddening control drives The Argument, and even now, after hearing this album hundreds of times, I find it startling. "The Kill," "Strangelight," "Ex-Spectator," and "Argument" all feeling just as much like tests of will as they do absolutely incredible songs.
  
  And how incredible is "Argument"? Here's the (pre-9/11) opening lyric: "When they start falling/ Executions will commence," which is intro'd by a gorgeous little swirl of percussion and rich guitar tones. And that middle eight! Piano and strings from the bottom of the ocean, the song bubbling back up, MacKaye murmuring, "I'm on a mission/ To never agree," and then the fuse is ignited, the guitars sparked, and MacKaye's ohm-like intonation: "Here comes the argument… Here comes the argument… Here comes…"

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#11 Two indie rap heavy hitters team up to drop a bugged-out insta-classic

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  Madvillainy by Madvillain Pick

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  The highly anticipated collaboration between two of independent hip-hop’s finest, Madlib and MF Doom, Madvillainy received rave reviews upon its release and, hindsight being 20/20, they were pretty much right. Stitching together a patchwork of vintage soul, jazz, movie music and who knows what else, Madlib constructs a musical fabric that wraps beautifully around the enigmatic Doom’s lazy monotone. Peppered with references to the joys of marijuana (“Spliff made him swore he saw heaven when he was seven”) and boasts of his own surpassing villainy (“Let he who is without sin cast the first stone/ After you who’s last, it’s Doom, he’s the worst known”), Doom’s words are often too oblique to make sense of. He strings together barely-connected phrases of half-sense, near-sense and nonsense with a kind of playfulness and joy in the sheer musical possibilities of language that recalls John Ashbery. The cumulative effect is mesmerizing and a little dreamlike, creating a different kind of logic, one with its own particular lucidity — as when Doom, rapping over a beautiful accordion loop played by the electronic music artist Daedelus, casually comes out with: “Slip like Freudian/ Your first and last step to playin’ yourself like accordion.”

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#10 Canadian indie rockers record a masterpiece

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  Funeral by Arcade Fire Pick

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  The title of Arcade Fire's debut was inspired by a succession of bereavements afflicting the band during its creation. Forced to the creative brink by such an accumulation of sadness, Funeral finds them delving into some odd corners, particularly in the four-part "Neighborhood" suite, a fantasy about children living in the snow, developing without adult input during a prolonged power-cut. Despite the prominently keening violins, the band's dense, layered sound has some similarities with the Flaming Lips, especially since Win Butler's strained squawk of a voice inescapably recalls Wayne Coyne's. The inevitability of aging is the album's main theme, with "flowers growing on the grave of our love" in "Crown of Love," and Butler observing in "Wake Up" how "now that I'm older, my heart [is] colder." Regine Chassagne's "In the Backseat," meanwhile, brings a bittersweet poetry to bereavement, as she notes how "my family tree's losing all its leaves."

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#9 This mournful, stylish debut fit the times like an Armani suit

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  Turn On The Bright Lights by Interpol Pick

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  In rock music, as in life, being in the right place at the right time is everything. Into the grave new world of 2002, New York quartet Interpol released a debut album that embodied a seemingly paradoxical blend of melancholy and desperate hope, a romantic sense of depression. The Germans call it Weltschmerz, and it fit the times like an Armani suit.
  
  While singer Paul Banks delivers dire lines like "You go stabbing yourself in the neck" in a foreboding baritone brimming with dread, it's redeemed by catchy drums, propulsive melodies and bass lines that lumber and veer like a practiced drunk. And yet for all its drama, Turn On bears the comfort of the familiar, echoing early '80s English bands like Joy Division, the Smiths and Echo and the Bunnymen — bands who also happened to hail from troubled northern towns.
  
  It's a city album — every immaculate surface of the recording is spit-shined with carefully calibrated reverb redolent of skyscraper lobbies and urban canyons. Declaring "Subway is a porno," "NYC" nails the love/hate relationship New Yorkers have with their city; the song is the very soul of urban sophistication. Elsewhere, things can turn sentimental, but only to affirm a re-emerging faith in rock music as vehicle for salvation. When Banks intones, "We have 200 couches where you can sleep tonight," you believe him.

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#8 The taut, brooding mission statement that presaged a string of classics

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  Girls Can Tell by Spoon Pick

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  Time may not exactly heal all wounds, but it can lend the perspective and strength to channel pain into something positive. Such is the case with Spoon; their perennial indie rock underdog status and disastrous stint on Elektra have focused and tempered the trio's brash energy instead of crushing it. Their third full-length, Girls Can Tell, reflects the group's lean, hungry stance in its spare, spiky, immaculately crafted songs. "Take the Fifth" and "Take a Walk" take Spoon's smart, bouncy, slightly tough signature sound to another level; while the ghosts of the Pixies, Nirvana, and Elvis Costello still haunt songs like "Lines in the Suit," Girls Can Tell's sharp wordplay, barbed guitars, and appealingly raw vocals prove that the group embraces their influences without becoming slaves to them. Britt Daniel's increasingly eclectic and expansive songwriting comes to the forefront on "Everything Hits at Once," a taut, brooding pop song driven by vibes, keyboards, yearning, and pride; "Me and the Bean" suggests the direction alternative/indie rock should have taken after Nirvana's implosion. This album is also Spoon's most emotionally eclectic collection of songs, ranging from "Anything You Want," a sunny pop song drawn with just a few artfully placed strokes to "1020 AM," a brooding, slightly psychedelic piece of folk-rock that recalls Daniel's Drake Tungsten side project. "This Book Is a Movie," an appropriately tense, filmic instrumental, and "Chicago at Night," a slightly spooky pop song with winding guitars and an off-kilter melody, complete Girls Can Tell, making it Spoon's most mature, accomplished work to date and a fine balance of fire and polish.

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#7 Panda Bear teaches indie rock to embrace its inner Beach Boy

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  Person Pitch by Panda Bear Pick

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  Person Pitch may not sound like a singles album, but that’s exactly what it is. Culled from 12-inches and compilation appearances, the songs on the album don’t reflect the product of an intense period of recording; instead, the album is a general expression of what Noah Lennox has been up to in the years since his second album, 2004's Young Prayer (i.e., getting married, having a child, moving to Portugal). In other words, Lennox has been busy getting happy.
  
  You can tell simply from the song titles — “Comfy in Nautica,” “Bros,” “Search for Delicious” — but the songs themselves confirm it: “Comfy” opens the shutters on the album by slowly revealing a storefront of chanting and hand-clapping backup singers behind Lennox’s slow-motion singalong. “Take Pills” ups the tempo, gradually building its way from a waltzing lullaby into a looped verse from a forgotten Avalon/Funicello beach movie.
  
  But the two sunny movements of "Take Pills" are trumped by “Good Girl/Carrots,” which finds time for organic trance, a nursery rhyme-esque middle and a narcotic dub coda. The undisputed highlight, though, is the twelve-minute “Bros,” which sounds built expressly for Julee Cruise, until Lennox rubs his eyes and the song goes widescreen. Judging by these results, we could stand to hear Lennox happy more often.

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#6 Gangsta-rap Shakespeare — dense, soulful, surreal, and utterly flawless

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  Supreme Clientele by Ghostface Killah Pick

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  Ghost perfected his fabulously high-living, gold medallion-and-plush bathrobe-wearing, showman persona on this flawless 2000 album. At a time when the Wu brand was flagging, Ghost put the Clan on his back. Beats by the RZA and a host of RZA sound-alikes insured that Supreme Clientele would have a classic feel, but it was Ghost's flair for language — Nikes, Monty Hall, Zima and ziti all find a home in his rhyme book — that made this album a classic. "Cherchez La Ghost" was a rare moment of disco infiltration, while no-frills classics like the late-1980s-signifying "Mighty Healthy" and the regal horn blasts of "Apollo Kids" were reminders of the empire that once was.

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#5 Irretrievably decayed, irresistibly angelic: Burial

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  Untrue by Burial Pick

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  We all know about the "Difficult Second Album" — the oft-rushed record made amid suffocating expectations and incessant touring. But some follow-ups not only make good on a promising debut but also retroactively imbue the entire enterprise with more intrigue than could have been recognized at the start. In 2007, M.I.A.’s Kala and LCD Soundsystem’s Sound of Silver entered the ranks of this special kind of second album, and so did Burial’s Untrue.
  
  Part of the allure of dubstep, the sound that Burial — an anonymous London musician — helped establish, is that it’s so sparse and elemental that it eludes description almost by design: To formally address the qualities of dubstep is to paradoxically do damage to its most evocative parts — the parts that aren’t there, the haunted parts, the spectral spaces that surround the tangible sounds and make it all happen through the force of their very absence. It’s complicated, but it’s also extremely compelling — and more immediately so on Untrue than it was on the self-titled 2006 debut that made Burial’s name.
  
  Untrue benefits from the conspicuous presence of vocals that prove newly forceful and free. Whereas voices served as atmospheric agents on the debut, here they drive tracks into the space of certifiable songs. “Archangel” announces the change at the start, with a mercury-mouthed male diva singing about “kissing you” and “holding you” in desperate, unsettling tones. A similar strategy plays out in “Near Dark,” in which the vocal sentiment in the refrain “I can’t take my eyes off you” applies just as much to ears.
  
  The way that Burial foregrounds vocals as melody-makers veers back toward 2-step garage, the poppy post-jungle sound that ultimately evolved into grime and then into dubstep. The formal lures of dubstep proper remain here, but they also sound more kinetic and progressive. Even when the voices fade and drift like mist in the background, there are moods to be gleaned from the beats — the ticks and trips that toggle like drum ’n’ bass risen from the grave as something irretrievably decayed but also irresistibly angelic.

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#4 Cross-genre, pan-global, bi-lingual, fan-tastic

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  Arular by M.I.A. Pick

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  Probably the most critically acclaimed new artist of the mid '00s, Maya Arulpragasam is also among its most controversial, in two different ways. Po-faced style purists chide her grab-bag embrace of numerous urban sounds (Brazilian baile funk on "Bucky Done Gun," London grime on "Galang," vigorous neo-electro on "10 Dollar") without having "done her time" in any particular scene (as if pop forms weren't rewired regularly by tinkerers rather than apprentices). The other reason is a lot more serious: Arulpragasam is the daughter of a Sri Lankan political rebel affiliated with the Tamil Tigers, an organization devoted to armed struggle since 1983; they are said to have essentially invented modern suicide bombing. Maya not only doesn't run from this legacy, she devotes a lot of her art (her award-nominated visual work as well as her music) to invoking it: "Like PLO, we don't surrender," she chants in "Sunshowers," for instance. It might not make her a terrorist, but it certainly makes people uneasy.
  
  Despite all of this, or maybe because of it, Arular, Arulpragasam's debut as M.I.A., is one of the most consistently thrilling pop records anyone has made. What's especially impressive about this is that while the album is hardly devoid of melody (M.I.A.'s sing-songy chatter is highly hummable), it is remarkably short of instrumental detail: These tracks' aural character is almost entirely down to their beats and bass, and their differences come across on the tiniest and tinniest of speakers. Arular is endlessly playful, which means you can play it endlessly.

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#3 John Darnielle's guitar, his hope, his despair, and his memories

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  The Sunset Tree by The Mountain Goats Pick

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  John Darnielle has built a career on writing pointed vignettes about optimists, pessimists, romantics and miscreants but it turns out his most affecting story is his own. Turning to autobiography for the first time, Darnielle documents his terrible childhood with alarming focus. It's the immediacy that makes the record so affecting — in Darnielle's songs his stepfather's abuse and his own desperate attempts to escape from it aren't sealed off by memory but always happening in the present tense, making the wounds seem eternally fresh and open. He's dressed up the dry strum that defined his early cassette-recorded outings, but just barely — a piano plinks softly down the bridge of "Broom People" and a violin scrambles across the tense "Lion's Teeth." But mostly it's just Darnielle, his guitar and his memories, delivering equal parts hope and despair.

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#2 In which we meet the decade's most indelible cast of characters

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  Separation Sunday by The Hold Steady Pick

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  It's a testament to how vital and enduring a band the Hold Steady were this decade that you could easily quibble with the selection of Separation Sunday as "the one." Like all cult bands, no one agrees on which their "best" album is; everyone has their personal favorite. Only the most fully realized of artistic worlds has this kind rich, multilayered appeal.
  
  However, we're still willing to go to bat for Separation Sunday. Why? Because this was the first time that Craig Finn introduced us to one of the most indelible cast of musical characters of the decade. Hallelujah, Charlemagne, all the rest — this was our induction into Craig Finn's rich, squalid, transcendent, utterly human world. The rest is all just details, and highly arguable — we prefer the slightly ragged, dirty feel of Sunday to some of their more highly polished later records; they sound more like an actual bar band here and less like a professional outfit with a million bar bands' worth of tricks up their sleeve. But none of that really matters. What matters was that Separation Sunday was our induction into the cult, and for that, we will forever be grateful to it.

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#1 The 21st century's first masterpiece of blasé theatre

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  Is This It by The Strokes Pick

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  On Is This It, the exhaustion arrives before the party. We open on young Julian, bleary-eyed, fashionably disaffected and soggy with alcohol, following a leggy brunette to her 3rd story walkup, collapsing on her couch and sighing, "Can't you see I'm trying? I don't even like to," before concluding, "I'm just way too tired." It's a 21st Century Peggy Lee routine, forcing yourself to try to drink and joke and fuck when all you feel is blown-out and exhausted. Even the record's first few notes are indicative: a tape deck running at top speed — a party in progress — that suddenly, grinds to a sickening halt.
  
  It doesn't take much philosophical acrobatics to find the metaphor here. Released just four weeks after September 11th (forcing the song "New York City Cops" to be dropped from the record), Is This It seemed eerily poised — when we were all ready to think about such things again — to tap into our collective numbness. "Hard times opened their eyes," Casablancas presciently moans before the album is even 10 minutes old, "Saw pain in a new way, high stakes for a few names." It's a moment of lazy revelation, peeling back the hypnotic trance brought on by years of routine to find there's nothing underneath but a gaping chasm.
  
  But a strange thing happens to Is This It round about the halfway mark: the clouds break. The static, sluggish tempos start to restlessly kick, and the pinprick guitars start twitching. It's the sound of a band suddenly finding hidden stores of reserve and stumbling wide-eyed into the moment where you stop going to parties to fill up the blank spaces on your calendar and you start going because parties are fun. Is This It is a snapshot of a generation moving from desperation to — dare we say it — wary optimism.
  
  These conjectures are loose outlines at best. To attach too much significance to Is This It is to saddle it with a pretense it doesn’t want. In fact, one of the things that stands out about the record now, 8 years removed from its initial release, is how tidy it is. There are no grandstanding sentiments, no labored orchestral passages, no arty lyrical constructs, no naked bids for the loose ends of your heartstrings. It doesn't portend to any great insights, and it defies generational longevity — your grandsons? They won't understand. It is, simply put, a ruthlessly minimal and impressively un-flashy record, the kind of record made by a band raised by Other Music and whose first few gigs found them opening for Guided By Voices and establishing weeklong residencies in grotty former movie theaters in Philadelphia. It may have come out on a major label, but Is This It has got all the reserve and stubborn austerity of a mid-period Spoon album. The group even neatly sidestepped a 'Rock is Back!' clusterfuck at the 2002 VMAs, declining to perform as part of a package that included both the Vines and the Hives, two bands that from this distance seem even more scripted and cartoonish than they did at the time. The Strokes, though, despite their idiotic good looks and Gatsbyesque backstories, still feel strangely human. And stripped from all the petty bickering that surrounded the band upon their arrival — chiefly, their famous families and ridiculous privilege — what's remarkable about Is This It is just how unlikely a chart hit it is. And critics at the time may have been summoning Television and the Velvet Underground to describe the group, but neither of those bands managed to turn bloodshot sarcasm into box office gold the way the Strokes did. Credit that to the zeitgeist: Radiohead had technological anxiety down cold and OutKast mastered flop-sweat paranoia, but Is This It was the sound of young boys bred on disaffection, apathy and diminished expectations taking one last, cautious shot at engagement.
  
  And, if anything, this was the aughts: opening on a note of despair and slowly, steadily, confidently, working toward a measure of levity and possibility and hope. It's hard to capture the feeling the moment the corner turns on the album, and the clanging, shameless, impossible pop hit "Last Nite," with its admonishment, "Baby, don't feel so down," rushes in. Twice over the last few weeks I've caught myself grinning and whispering, "finally!" the second the drums kick in. The album's final half whips by with barely a pause between the songs, as if the band is rushing toward daylight. "I lost my page again….but I'll try my luck with you," Casablancas sings near the album's conclusion. And then, voice ragged and stern, he makes his decision: "This life is on my side — believe me, this is a chance."

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