*The* 250 Rock and Roll and Folk Albums of the 21st Century, Part 2: 2006-2010
Welcome to part two of The 250 Rock and Roll and Folk Albums: 2000-2025. Please feel free to read part one HERE, but don't feel like it's necessary in order to undersatnd the plot.
As explained in part one: Is this list the "best" or "top" 250 rock & folk albums of the last twenty-five years? Is it an overview? The answer to both these questions is in the title. See where the italics are placed? There you go.
2005-2010, the Sounds of the Bottom Falling Out
Mr. Rollins' prediction re: Blood Brothers' music saving us all proved to be somewhat premature
If you want a sense of how absolutely positively brutal the end of the Aughts was for anything not either religiously pop-minded or folksily insular, go check out some reviews of the debut solo album by Karin Dreijer of the Knife. To 2026 ears, Fever Ray (also the name of Dreijer’s project) is a sparkling, cascading work. It’s patient, but hardly dour. But to 2009 critics, who were in the second year of an endless slurry of wallpaper-psych, MGMT-mandated euphoria, and something called “beach goth,” Dreijer’s vocal acrobatics and steel-drum-esque synths were–even in the most laudatory reviews—seen as “dour,” “claustrophobic,” and “glacial.” The indie landscape was so drooling with spoonfed joy that a relentlessly lovely album which sounded like wind blowing through oceanside palm trees on an early fall day, was considered a challenging work of postpartum existentialism. It’s no wonder that a hard psych band like the Blood Brothers broke up in ‘07. They saw the writing on the wall and knew that any hopes of ascendant crossover, from extreme-o hipness to Bohemia proper, would have to wait until sounding unstoned came back into fashion.
It would be a long wait. Because the guitar acts which did thrive mainly did so by either following the Arcade Fire playbook (i.e. U2, but Canadian), unfunkily whining like Talking Heads in too-tight suits, cosplaying Flying Nun but with the added novelty of not including the hooks, or subscribing to the keg-stand idiotologies of neo-garage-punk as set by the age-gap nihilists over at Burger Records. In all of those dire scenes, there were bright spots. Those bright spots were invariably the least popular of the crews. Millennial nü boomers may protest this characterization, but go ask a musician who was trying to sound awake in 2007-2011 what albums came out in that period which they enjoyed and watch their expression harden as their eyes fixate on something far off in the distance.
I should note that, during this time, if your interest in rock music was more about the accompanying cultural flair typically associated with the medium—like, say, staying awake for days on end and not returning post coital texts—the latter half of the decade was pretty decent. And if that’s the case, feel free to ignore this list entirely and just read the Modular Recordings Discogs page. (And, to be clear, if there was a comp. with just the Presets, New Young Pony Club, Cut Copy, and Klaxons greatest hits, that compilation would 100% be on this list. Hell, if there was a CD of just “Ice Cream,” followed by “Down Down Down” twenty times, I’d have put it on, surrounded by drawings of plastic straws and hearts.)
I should also mention that Ronen Givony’s new book, Us v. Them: The Age of Indie Music and a Decade In New York (2004-2014), argues the exact opposite of my dire assessment of the era. Givony’s history is valuable on its own terms and his writing makes a strong case, leading me to reassess a number of acts that I’d dismissed. I was even compelled to put on Animal Collective’s Merriweather Post Pavillion as I read it.
Made it through three songs. A personal best.
Also, both Vampire Weekend and Mysterious Guy Hardcore happened in this era. In accordance with the non-aggression pact between Ezra Koenig and myself, the former will not be discussed here (though I’ll cop to enjoying the band’s later, more Happy Mondays influenced, work). The latter was admittedly pretty peppy and I’d get into it more, but then they’d have to call it something else. I can say that I was once the fifth wheel on a double date to go see Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, and one of the daters was Mark McCoy. I name drop these elder statesmen not to brag, but to affirm my credentials. All this esoteric knowledge has been hard fought for and, through my struggles, you can trust my assessments of the times.
With that, I present to you The 250 Rock & Roll & Folk Music of 2000-2025 Part 2: 2006-2010 (AKA, at least in NYC, as “the fallow years, after ‘Maps’ and before Crazy Spirit”)
Let’s get to it, boppers.
January
Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2005 Revival Cast) (Nonesuch) In the same period as the execrable Panic! At The Disco and the perfectly serviceable My Chemical Romance were foisting their musical theatre-rock upon a generation of scramz survivors eager to turn seventeen and no longer be shouted at, there premiered on Broadway a novel interpretation of Sondheim’s goth-operatic masterpiece, Sweeney Todd, The Demon Barber Etc., Etc.. In this version (so much better than the Depp/Bonham Carter flick by magnitudes which are difficult to quantify), the original’s orchestra was replaced by the actors; with all musical accompaniment performed onstage by those players themselves, even as they sang and performed their pulp crime melodrama. If the idea of one of the great pieces of American theatre rendered as avant chamber music doesn’t immediately get your pulse racing—even if the idea of a Broadway musical which anthemically declares “There's a hole in the world / Like a great black pit / And it's filled with people / Who are filled with shit / And the vermin of the world Inhabit it / But not for long! / They all deserve to die!” doesn’t fill your heart with joy—well... I am sorry to hear that. But even if you’re so jaded, the phrase “Patti LuPone plays the tuba" should still thrill.
February
Oakley Hall - Second Guessing (Amish Records Required Wreckers) Oakley Hall (named after the late author who wrote westerns and detective fiction featuring Ambrose Bierce as his hero) were slightly buzzy, and are largely forgotten now. Which is unjust as both the vocal interplay of Rachel Cox and ex-Oneida Pat Sullivan, and the band’s wry/incisive songcraft has aged better than that of most bands of the decade. Not to mention that their melancholy Cowgirl-in-the-Sand riffs are second to none.
According to the bandcamp page, “Time Out New York's Mike Wolf has described it as ‘excellent,’ naming Oakley Hall ‘the untamed sound of country rock,’ a band that ‘rocks so damn hard it makes all other twang acts simply sound like failure in comparison.’” This scans, despite the fact that Mike Wolf once called me a shitty singer in the pages of Time Out, in a review of a band I wasn’t even in. Which kind of hurt my feelings. Doubly hurt now that I see he was so right about this other thing.
April
Killing Joke - Hosannas from the Basements of Hell (Cooking Vinyl) The first band to ask the essential question: “what if we mixed Lemmy Hawkwind with Lemmy Motörhead?” make the Sisters of Mercy album that Andrew Eldritch promised to make if Trump was elected. And they did so ten years ahead of schedule, back when Trump was just a small town racist living out Mark Burnett’s dream of destroying the USA. Even setting aside Killing Joke inventing crust punk and writing Nirvana’s grooviest tune, Jaz Coleman is a visionary. No wonder they named America’s Greatest Art Form after him.
Spank Rock - YoYoYoYoYo (Big Dada) The rot at the center of the Indie Sleaze Revival has nothing to do with the term not having existed in the Aughts (it was indeed a “thing” and also, like, who gives a shit). Nor is the issue that all the imagery associated with it is party photography of Charli XCX stans who look like they’ve never heard a lick of Louis XIV (and good for them, but still…). Nor is the failure solely due to none of the revival's men quite knowing how to pull off a hoodie/blazer combo. The real issue—the real proof that the attempted reenactment is an entirely fraudulent project, doomed to be as non-procreational as the cultural blip it clamors to approximate—is simply that there has been no ten-foot tall bronze statue of the Baltimorean lover, Naeem Juwan Hanks (AKA Spank Rock) erected in the center of Dimes Square. It’s like trying to do a Sexy Civil War Reenactment without Baberaham Lincoln.
Natacha Atlas - Mish Maoul (Mantra Records) Nowadays, it seems like any failed trance dj from the Netherlands can go to Africa and recruit a few gnawa musicians and get signed to Glitterbeat. But, in the 1990s, when “world beat” was a thing, combining chill beats and ethnographic sounds from across the globe was also very much in vogue, and few were better at it than Natacha Atlas, the Egyptian-Belgian superstar whose transcontinental roots gave her cred backed by an almost supranatural gift for hooks rendered in any musical language. Fifteen years into her career, she made one of her finest and smoothest circumnavigations. Nothing but the swoosh of the net. The fact that her brief helicopter-ing into the field of rap eventually grows on you is only further proof of a charisma that pays borders no mind whatsoever.
May
Marked Men - Fix My Brain (Swami / Dirtnap Records) The best pop-punk album of the aughts. I’d say “arguably,” only because there are plenty of otherwise reasonable people, maybe even the Marked Men themselves, who would disagree that this is pop-punk. But I’m not going to say “arguably” because I refuse to undercut the unassailable truth of the initial claim. If those who disagree want to cede the good and noble genre of pop-punk to the mouth-breathers, Warped Tour profiteers, and adolescent (in both attitude and proclivity) girl touchers, that’s on them. I shan’t be a party to said compromise. Best. Pop. Punk. Album. Of. The. Aughts.
Ronnie Spector - The Last Of The Rock Stars (way too many labels that no longer exist to type out) OK. Look. Yes, this second-to-last studio album by the former Ronette is not, technically speaking, “great.” Maybe, by current and past critical standards, it’s not even “good." Is much of the songwriting here subpar? Yessir. Are the guitars and horns recorded for maximum solid gold dancing? They are. The album is, after all, produced by Jonathan Greenfield, a man whose sole recording credit is “Ronnie Spector’s husband.”
But let me say something. So it’s clear.
Ronnie Spector’s voice? Sounds NICE.
As does, somewhere in the mix, Nick Zinner’s guitar. So do the Greenhornes… greenhornery. Within the limitations of the production, Joe McGinty and the Raveonettes acquit themselves with charm, and no dignity lost so you’d notice. Basically, Last Of The Rock Stars is odd and pleasurable to listen to; so long as the listener remembers the joy of camp. Envision, if the listener will, Jonathan Greenfield as a loving but hapless wannabe; an open heart, an opener wide-collared shirt, and ears that only had eyes for his wife. Imagine this producer doing what the other Mr. Spector never could; loving Ronnie more than music itself. Now picture it all as an SCTV skit.
Or, just recall a time when there was such a thing as kitsch without a smarmy wink attached. In that regard, the spoken word duet between Ronnie and Keith Richards is, above all else, mnemonic.
And mainly remember this:
Ronnie Spector’s voice? Sounds. Real. NICE.
PS. next time someone tries to tell you about how great Pitchfork was in the aughts, please print out this 3.7 review, and make a shiv of the following lines, and stab them in the chest with it:
“If The Last of the Rock Stars shows anything other than that the former Mrs. Spector has a laughably high opinion of herself, it's that she remains primarily a singles artist. The one you want is the Amy Rigby-penned "All I Want", a bouncy, believable grown-up teenage symphony about just wanting "something to show me that you care/ Whether I live or die". Opener "Never Gonna Be Your Baby" at least boasts a big, self-referential hook, even if the wannabe-tough-guy guitars and lifelong-smoker-voiced "wet thoughts of you" mature pr0n come-ons diminish what suits call "replay value".
The pillar of critical thought over here clutching nerd-pearls at elder dame horniness, while sneering at the perceived self-over-regard of RONNIE FUCKING SPECTOR. Nice golden age of criticism you got there. Be a real shame if Halsey was righ…
*cough*
Let’s keep it moving.
July
Lily Allen - Alright, Still (Regal) Years before both the Sleaford Mods or the Oi! Revival, there was Lily Allen, dropping half full pint glasses on the dancefloor just to make a mess and because she loved the sound of breaking glass. On her debut, she keeps things ostensibly sunny while giving one of the early indications that, in the midst of Aughts-VICE-bacchanalia, not all the participants were having the times of their lives. Or they were indeed having the time of their lives, and the meagerness of that time/life was beginning to wear down on something essential inside them.
September
Made Out Of Babies - Coward (Neurot Records) On "Silverback," Julie Christmas kicks off the second MOOB album by channeling the scream that Nick Cave used to start “Mutiny in Heaven” (and the Moodists used to open “Gone Dead”). Subtle in her way, Christmas does it seven times, staggering and layering each terrified/terrorizing wail, so it feels like seven Julie Christmases scaring each other in a burning building, for a full thirteen seconds, before breathlessly trilling in our ear: “Drying stains spell things in words uneasily.” As a critic, I can only reply “tell me about it.” And she does exactly that, at least the embodying a burning building part, for the next forty minutes, as the baby parts (made up of former Players Clubs and Kil Van Kull, and future Red Sparrows, Low Estate, and Unsane members) herk and jerk the architecture around her. Predictably, for an outfit this self evidently teetering on chaos, the band members remaining on speaking terms with each other had an expiration date built in.
Fall of Efrafa - Owsla (Alerta Antifascista, Behind the Scenes, Deskontento Records, Fight For Your Mind, Symphony of Destruction) Part one of the Warren of Snares trilogy—each LP with multiple ten-minute-plus songs based on Alex CF’s interpretation of the theology subscribed to by the bunnies in Watership Down. Honestly, because the drummer beats the stadium crust out of his thumpers so hard, they shoulda called it the “War on Snares.” Every other aspect of the music to be found here is as pretty as anything found in nature. Even CF’s singing, which is carved out of a birch tree. ALSO HIGHLY RECOMMENDED (made, ten years later, by some of the same people): Morrow - Fallow (Halo of Flies / Alerta Antifascista)
Los Lobos - The Town and The City (Hollywood Records) Irritatingly overlooked in the Great American Rock Band Discourse, Los Lobos seems to suffer for being too classic, too consistent, and not dying in some elaborate fashion. But, as this album well demonstrates, David Hidalgo & Co. don’t need to be performatively tragic to be Shakespearian in scope. Or maybe they’re content being the Great Band From East L.A., knowing full well that that story extends outwards exponentially.
October
Mickey Avalon - s/t (Myspace Records) One might protest the inclusion of this critically reviled album, especially on such a high-minded and correct list. A high-minded person might bristle at an album by a Dirt Nasty affiliated rapper being included on a list that already contains a limited number of hip hop albums. To these points I will say this: First, any 21st Century list should have at least one MySpace Records album, and it’s a pretty exclusive list. Second, the mistake is in thinking of this as a rap album as opposed to what it clearly is: the first Egg Punk album, AKA The Spits doing Eminem songs—which they’ve never once heard—from memory.
See, all it takes is a lil’ ally-oop in yr POV and now doesn’t it sound fucking awesome? (PS. Anyone who thinks “egg punk” is a reach here should feel free to check the song credits on “Waiting to Die.”)
November
Getatchew Mekuria & The Ex - Moa Anbessa (Terp Records) Over the last half century, The Ex have built an extensive catalog, so I don’t want to say with certainty that this is their only album calling for the return of a constitutional monarchy. But let’s cut the lefties some slack and concede that Ethiopia’s Dergue regime didn’t exactly slather communism in glory (as the Ex’s compatriots in the Mekons once sang, about another fallen regime which postured at Marxism, “this funeral is for the wrong corpse”). And it’s not like Haile Sellassie hasn’t inspired more than his fair share of great tunes… with this album spilling over with ‘em. Anyway, I can confidently say that the Dutch punkers’ tribute to the crown, made as the backing band for—and in collaboration with—the great and free Ethiopian saxophonist Getatchew Mekuria, is a million times less embarrassing than anything regarding royalty expressed by John Lydon in the last decade.
The Long Blondes - Someone To Drive You Home (Rough Trade) Nothing but hits, all of them smashing. Few of which were actually—in the staid sense—hits. But that’s par for course in this dumb world. In the next life, everyone who swooned over these indie demi-demi-demigods repurposing Cab Volt's “NagNagNag” into a post-Brit Pop soccer chant will be rewarded.
Tom Waits - Orphans, Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (Anti-) A Christmas gift from my Father this same year this triple disc accompanied me post death spiral of the CD industry and my personal hamfisted transfer of everything to digital, as usual a few years late on my end. It was also there through stimulants-fueled last minute college term papers and the romantic misadventures fit for a 21 year old dirtbag with a dog eared Fante in his back pocket. This unsparing collection of the man’s innermost derelict and romantic selves was a welcomed feast to hold us over for the next five years until Bad As Me dropped. Waits was always a secret weapon in my own rap-song writing inspo cache. A rock which I figured few of my peers would seriously care to look under save for a sample or two. A friend to the downtrodden and troubadour for the troubled lots of ink has been spilled by better minds than mine but the fact remains Tom really still had his fastball in 06’ regardless of when the bulk of these were recorded (allegedly all over the map but more than a handful relatively current.) Perhaps the first disc is for the bar fights, the second for the lovers and the last for the true test of the weirdo diehards that has plenty of his oddball Jodorowsky beat poetry to go around. It’s kind of a perfect triumvirate and “Songs that fell behind the stove while making dinner” remains the coolest album descriptor of all time. There is something to be said about saying nothing at all. Maybe God himself is lost and needs help? 56 songs and 3 hours. Sharp-witted, political and unapologetically weird a great artist who abstained from the social media sized stain on the legacy we still don’t know shit about Tom and this is another feather in the fedora of our coolest living artist. - PremRock, Shrapknel, Philadelphia, PA
January
Joe Coffee - When The Fabric Don’t Fit The Frame (self released in 2007 then by I Scream in 2009 / Lifeline Records) Staten Island’s finest soul singer (let’s say “ahead of Pete Steele but tied with Force MDs” to avoid hurt feelings) and second finest crooner (I don’t think he’d want me to disrespect Bobby Darin), Paul Bearer, on a then extended break from Sheer Terror, opens his giant and problematic heart to the world. The world, accordingly, did what it tends to do. Let’s not pretend that Bearer’s main gig doesn’t have its share of wristcutters and, while neither would jump at being included in the emo canon, let’s also not pretend that Sheer Terror’s frontman and Supertouch’s Mark Ryan weren’t both trailblazers in the field of gruff hurt-people-hurt-people-core. But on the second Joe Coffee album, Bearer leaves the gravel voice almost entirely behind, focussing instead on his plaintive, occasionally gothic, tenor. While lyrically there’s nothing here as flat-out lacerating as 2002’s “Staten Island Serenade,” the songs here are more fleshed out—ornate even—and Bearer’s voice is more confident; allowing the tough guy’s hurt to ring out. His laughter and bravado carry the sadness in the songs rather than undercut. You’d have to be more hardcore than I to not be moved like crazy.
Warkrime - Get Loose (No Way Records) Maybe one could argue that Brace Belden’s band of anti-everything, provocation-punx is of more historical value than artistic, but one could say the same thing about Yellow Submarine, Dee Dee Ramone’s rap album or, like, the Bible. And this is as good as at least two of those.
Warkrime being 100% sincere. You should make a post about it.
February
Trigger Renegade - Destroy Your Mind (Black Top Fade Records) I know literally nothing about this band (and in fact only discovered them this year through, surprise surprise, Chuck Eddy). I guess two of ‘em ended up in Huntress. Just… listen to the album. If you like hard rock, you will thank me (and/or Chuck Eddy). Just absurd levels of hooks-per-minute rawk. That said, if you don’t really dig hard rock, you can maybe safely move on ahead…
Jesse Sykes & the Sweet Hereafter - Like, Love, Lust & the Open Halls of the Soul ( Barsuk / Southern Lord) Jesse Sykes is some kind of gold medal, with only Sixteen Horsepower/Wovenhand sharing the pedestal on which she stands, for being one of the only practitioners of Authentic Gothic Country Music not entirely indebted to Gun Club or Nick Cave. In fact, I’m not sure she and her heretofore sweeties are aware that either post-punk or Australia exists, so fixated are they on their singular rolling thunder doom-revue and the interior and immediate exterior of the heart. Other miracles to be found here include her voice; an instrument that conveys infinite fragility and infinite toughness simultaneously, lyrics which convey a love and lust (and maybe not so much “like” as an recognizing empathy) for all the cowboys and junkies whoever lived and died from too much honkeytonkin’ and not enough drinkin’ water.
Watain - Sworn to the Dark (Season of Mist) Not advocating for the spilling of animal blood, spreading scurvy—or any of the other apolitical bells and whistles for that matter—but I do think black metal bands would do well to see Watain as aspirational north stars. Wear corpse-paint, be original but not so much so that you’re doing something that doesn’t require corpse paint, and, if possible, write actual songs. Accuse all you like these satanic-scenesters of being hipster-bait, Dissection cosplayers, and the sort of dudes who very unsatanically date people in the fashion industry; doesn’t change the tr00th that this rager is one of the finest, overwrought and most finely-wrought, metal albums of the Aughts. Personally, I’d get to hailing if you know what’s good for you.
Jesu - Conqueror (Hydra Head Records) Post-metal is largely a scam, foisted upon us by bearded baristas with too much self-respect to peddle the Alice in Chains regurgitations favored by most practitioners of “alternative” metal, but lacking the strength of character to write Manowar riffs. I dunno if Jesu redeems the genre or just underlines how tedious so much of it is in comparison but, regardless, Conqueror is such a pivotal and unerringly gorgeous heavy come-down album of the time that a whole micro-generation of Early Man fans get a nasal drip and an urge to mass-text “u up?” whenever it comes on.
March
Big Business - Here Comes the Waterworks (Hydra Head Records) A dynamic duo, made up of fellas ex-Karp & ex-Murder City Devils, continue Hydra Head Records’ 2007 hot run* by attaching Dio melodies to a pet avalanche they raised since it was a pup. The band’s penchant for cutesy/ironic imagery, affinity for the Melvins, and song titles like “Grounds For Divorce” imply that Jared Warren might not see lyrics as a venue for expressing sincere feeling or ideas but I dunno; the omniscient narrator act is pretty compelling. Hell, for all the vagueness of its Lemon of Troy mythology, I find it all quite moving. Maybe I’m just a sucker for hooey well sung, especially when backed by the hardest hitting bump-n-grind drummer on Earth, or maybe meaning isn’t dependent on meaning every single part of it.
*A run which includes The Austerity Program’s Black Madonna… but I’m trying to keep the friend quotient down
Totalitär - Vi är eliten (Prank Records) D-beat is freak folk music for non-cultists/Coachella attendees.
Malouma - Nour (Marabi Productions) Having learned my lesson from looking into the political trajectory of the dude from Rose Tattoo, I won’t be able to tell you what kind of elected representative Malouma Mint El Mokhtar Ould El Meidah became once she left music behind to hold office in her native Mauritania. But if she was one-tenth as good a politician as she is a singer/songwriter, the streets of Nouakchott should have been paved with cheese in no time.
I did actually try to follow Malouma’s political path but it seemed complicated. What isn’t complicated (or is differently, positively, complicated) is Nour; an alchemical melding of traditional Mauritanian songcraft, moodist lamplight hanging, and an international blues that stutters as easily as it drawls. Also one of the coolest, most sumptuously minimalist and wildly beautiful collections of songs I’ve heard in my life. If I had one-tenth the inspiration in my fingertips as Malouma, I’d run for all the offices.
April
Panthers - The Trick (VICE Records) More fun, more grim, funnier, riffier, and darker than 99.99999% of more critically vaunted rock/punk/post-hep albums of the same year. Trust me when I tell you that the people in charge of music at the time were all fucking idiots. Also, this is the meanest review of Meet Me In The Bathroom you’ll ever hear. RIP Justin Chearno. Further Reading: https://zacharylipez.ghost.io/a-brief-100-accurate-history-of-the-21st-century-starring-panthers/
Lady Saw - Walk Out (VP) Lyrically not entirely as carnal as her previous work. That said, this is still body-on-body music. Empowering as they may be, you won’t find any foreshadowing of Marion Hall eventually stepping down as Queen of Dancehall crown, in order to go Christian gospel, in songs like “Power of the Pum.” On the other hand, when Lady Saw opens the album with “What do you want to talk about today? Me and them hypocrites? Alright!” she rocks and wobble-wobbles the tables off their axis so mightily, she might as well be kicking the moneylenders out of the temple.
June
Municipal Waste - The Art of Partying (Earache Records) Municipal Waste makes me almost proud to be an American. The guitar solo on “Lunch Hall Food Brawl” is practically patriotic. If skateboarding was a crime, this’d be outlaw country. Richmond’s wittiest and prettiest crossover re-heshers should have won a Nobel Prize for “Truth Telling In Album Titling.” A partying party that parties so hard it almost, if I didn’t know better, makes parties sound like something I might enjoy. Also, despite all efforts to the contrary, art.
August
M.I.A. - Kala (XL / Interscope) Hey, kid! You wanna play mind-crazed banjo on the druggy-drag ragtime U.S.A.???
Devastations - Yes, U (Beggars Banquet) If this list is overpopulated by misanthropic Cave-ien men who are citizens of Berlin in proclivity if not passport, well; excuse me for living. Dad was a mystery writer who instilled in me a love for noir and ever since Pulp Fiction taught a generation of potential noir film makers all the wrong lessons, the only place to get my fix (short of, you know, reading a book) is through those prematurely aged hair-do-wells who never met a button-up shirt they couldn’t mangle. These Melbournian bb seeds' first couple albums were great examples of the type, but not necessarily so great as to separate the Devastations from all the Crime & City Solution/Flaming Stars (who I adore and forgot to include in Part One)/Gallon Drunk b-movie (complimentary) practitioners. Here, on their third and final LP, the trio pull ahead of the pack. Partially because Conrad Standish literally rises a few octaves above both pack and his previous work, and partially because, like the better post-punk bands, Devastations opt to sonically use their inside-out knowledge of the medium to fuck about and take it outside the rockabilly ghetto it often roils in. On “Black Ice,” the band almost goes for a lo-burn Sade, if Ms. Adu ever deigned to sing about “walking with the bovine.” On every third track, Devastations funk it up like Tindersticks, if Mr. Staples saw fit to explore the world of Casio rhythm presets. On “The Pest,” a reedy soundwave pushes the sky away almost a decade before the Devastations’ social betters got around to it. If any/all of this sounds like faint praise, plz brush up on your KLF literature. Originality is just getting your betters wrong. Anyway, the originality I like is.
September
Muscles - Guns Babes Lemonade (Modular Recordings) Do yourself a favor and forget the indie sleaze revival canon. It’s 90% junk, and largely inaccurate in its choices. If you want to know what it was like to be insufferably hip, on cocaine, shirtless and eternally shoplifting from American Apparel, this is the album you need. If all the above sounds awful, it largely was. Somehow this dance-pop collection of vocoded hopefulness and personal-boundary-ignoring un-melodramas retains its cosmically sweaty pleasure. Drive. A. One. Inch. Badge. Pin. Through. My. Haaaaart (woo!).
October
Om - Pilgrimage (Southern Lord) If you want to know God, no ex-Sleep yippies are going to out-transcend the Staples Singers, I don’t care how many vibrations of the universe they channel. But if you want to convey actual religiosity in the 21st Century, Om’s one-trick (but what a trick!) of “devotional chanting plus jump scares” can’t be beat.
Vic Godard & Subway Sect- 1978 NOW (GNUinc Records) Artists re-recording old songs is rarely a good idea, and including an album of said re-recordings on a list such as this might be disrespectful to whatever album has been shunted to make room. But Vic Godard, post-punk-poet-turned-post-man-returned-to-poet, is rare in everything he does. These songs—some of the sharpest punk songs written in the twenty-five years prior to this list’s cutoff date, and miraculously re-recorded to sound boss as hell, possibly better than the originals—would otherwise be lost to time. So, out of gratitude, I’m including this album.
It also helps that spngs like "We Oppose All Rock And Roll," "Stool Pigeon," and I Changed My Mind (On the Telephone)" would all slap the silly right out of any similar tunage attempted by the "indie landfill" bands who formed twenty years after Subway Sect broke up. I mean, really, if "Chainsmoking" had been officially released the first time it was recorded, the entirety of UK indie would have had to close up shop.
btw Godard’s 2024 album, Everybody’s Scared Now (produced by Mick Jones!!!), is real nice as well.
Celebration - The Modern Tribe (4AD) A weird/joyous record by these ex-members of Jaks and Love Life. Dunno if they were trying to tap into the success of the artsy dippy-core onslaught or if they were aspiring to follow the traditional UK path of white-dread baddies eventually going caravan jam band. If either was the goal, Celebration failed. Gloriously so. There aren’t enough bubbly mellotrons in the world to mellow out Katrina Ford’s batcave pipes and if anyone was supposed to be blissed out by songs like “Pony” or “Hands Off My Gold,” nobody told the drummer—who plays like every song is “Mississippi Goddamn." Also nobody told Dave Sitek, whose production really captures that vaunted "house band of a castle under siege" feel.
Fun Fact No.1: Besides singing backups on multiple TVOTR recordings, Katrina Ford also contributed to the Dead Science’s Villainaire, a bonkers piece of operatic blurt from 2008 that I was looking for an excuse to include here.
FunFact No.2: Future Celebration member, Tony Drumond went to my high school a couple years before me and was in a local Doors-grunge band called “Motherlode.” Everybody in the north county, myself included, thought he was the cat’s meow.
January
The Bananas- New Animals (Recess Records) “Slop punk? Garage Pop? Jangly rock n roll with busy bass and lots of drummer provided backups made for enjoying a warm daytime PBR. Before wearing cutoff skinny jean jorts onstage and having one small homemade tattoo of Garfield vomiting and thinking ‘mmmm more lasagna’ on the lower thigh became popular, The Bananas were doing it - and doing it better than their children who may not know who their parents are. It all works out because this is the kind of punk that probably benefits not knowing your parents except in the rare case you started smoking pot with your mom in high school. Those of us who’d grown tired of Southern California slick production values and subject matter simply had to go north to Sacramento. Probably the only time anyone sought out Sacramento but I shouldn’t cast stones writing this from Texas.” - Mike Wiebe, Riverboat Gamblers, Drakulas, Austin, Texas, USA
Disfear - Live The Storm (Relapse) RIP Tomas Lindberg, a man with the voice of an angel. To be clear, the At The Gates singer’s lycanthropic roar was what an actual angel—of the Old Testament variety—probably sounds like, right before said cherub gets down to the culling of first borns, dispensing of sky-frogs, and all the other gnarly stuff reserved for pharaohs who get too big for their britches. As such, coupled with Kurt Ballou’s Baloo-bellied production, this final album by Lindberg’s d-beat band has a number of the aural qualities typically associated with a Red Sea clapping one’s empire into a silty pulp.
The Mars Volta - The Bedlam in Goliath (Universal Motown / GSL) At the cusp of the half decade which would see endless misshapes of unkempt male models, rappers-in-tight-pants, and sunken-eyed Canadians flooding the indies with (often pretty decent) variations on VSS and Kill Me Tomorrow, the Mars Volta put out this timeless leviathan and closed the doors on GSL forever. If that’s not ironic, it’s only because I still don’t know how to use “ironic” correctly. What isn’t ironic (???) is that Bedlam came out on Universal Motown. In both un-toppable showbiz stage presence and in their expansive working out of their psychedelic gospel, the distance between this album and Run Away Child, Running Wild/Papa Was a Rollin’ Stone-mode Temptations is only a few thousand guitar parts. At a certain point, what with Cedric Bixler-Zavala using a bunch of words under four syllables and “Agadez” even having a Melvin Franklin basso-vocal part, only the soul acts’ respective tailors can tell the difference.
April
Portishead - Third (Island / Mercury) Portishead claimed that they were listening to a lot of doom metal while making their first new studio album in eleven years. This potential influence was exciting. I was deejaying at a few rock and roll bars at the time and I assumed that all my fellow denim demons shared my adoration of the new doom metal album by Portishead. After the third time being yelled at by Motorcity customers and staff for playing “Machine Gun” at 1AM on a packed Saturday night, I was cured of this misapprehension. I still played it regularly, but I no longer expected dudes in Pagan Alter t-shirts to run up and congratulate me on my ability to connect disparate dots.
Santigold - Santogold (Downtown) When I recently posted how major this album is, the majority of responses were overwhelmingly positive (if a bit more neo-boomer-coded than I’d have liked) but there was a contingent who tried to whine at me that Santigold was somehow a M.I.A. clone. This was very annoying and wrong, but there was also some comfort seeing that Stan culture was breaking brains all the way back in 2008. Also, one can’t expect some online MisShapes effluvia to grasp this post-pop-punker’s larger context, one which encompasses both the aforementioned punky brew, 2-tone, dub, West coast electro, and a classic Nile Rodgers-ian tradition of hipsterdom (very complimentary). Of course, these songs are strong enough that naysayers should know better on merit but, you know, it’s an end of empire culture etc etc etc… To be clear tho, anyone who fails to see Santogold as anything other than a classic—on par with, like, the Zombies if not the Beatles—is an idiot. Shun them for the good of culture.
May
Eddy Current Suppression Ring - Primary Colours (Aarght! Records / Goner Records) An adherence to a certain guitar tone as fanatical as certain countrymen. Like those countrymen, the Suppression Ring made the near-impossible look easy. And, again like the akadaka, if as many bands ripped them off as you’d think, more bands’d be better.
June
Dustheads - Little Pieces (Don Giovani) Future members of Warthog and Byrds of Paradise make emotional hardcore as if neither NYHC or Orange County ever happened, which, in the midst of a pretty serious ‘80s hardcore revival, was as bold as Black Flag going jazz. I may be biased because the Heroin “brown bag” 7” is one of my favorite albums of all time and this is about as close to that as anyone has bothered coming to, but also please realize that I manage to love this album despite finding Jared Jones’ railing against culture vultures to be personally very hurtful.
The Bug - London Zoo (Ninja Tune) Meanies like to accuse those unfortunates with electromagnetic hypersensitivity of being neurotics or merely suffering from psychosomatic symptoms with no connection to 5G or empirically verified reality, but I guarantee that if there was an international moratorium on playing Kevin Martin’s heavy-dub project in general, London Zoo in particular, and “Poison Dart” by Warrior Queen in the micro, anywhere on Earth, for even one day, the influx into towns within the National Radio Quiet Zone would dry up like that.
July
Rokia Traoré - Tchamantché (Nonesuch Records) As singer, composer, internationally wanted down-by-law mother, Rokia Traoré is about as razor sharp as they come. Some may prefer her more “rock” adjacent stuff she’s done with John Parish but, to my mind, she’s at her finest here; close singing with Gretsch in hand. I’m tempted to resort to silver comparisons (they’re apt!) but instead I’ll go with the Lorca quote; “I put my head out of my window and see / how much the wind’s knife / wants to slice it off. / On this unseen / guillotine, I’ve placed / the eyeless head / of all my desires.” Honestly though, you could use anything that the Spanish poet wrote about the moon and that’d work too.
Jean Grae - Jeanius (Blacksmith) As actress, rapper, comedian, and etiquette professional, Jean Grae has long carried both Don Rickles and Bob Newhart as angels/devils on her shoulders; spitting takedowns as ably as she does a level of bemusement that can only come with having witnessed stupid shit that would break a lesser artist. This album, made in collaboration with 9th Wonder, was held in limbo for four years after it was made in 2004 and is now unavailable on all legit streaming/purchase platforms. Assuming she’d prefer this not be the case (Grae’s ambivalence regarding past accomplishments is well documented), that’s a shame because the gauzy soul of the beats, punctuated by one of the—in terms of both lyrics and cadence—sharpest MCs of the decade, has aged as well as it’s hardly aged a day. Maybe the latter has something to do with it never having been allowed to grow old at all, but more likely it’s because Grae is the kind of essayist who invites regular rereading.
Speaking of reading, Passion of Weiss unsurprisingly has the insight on the album you can use.
August
Gaslight Anthem - The ‘59 Sound (SideOneDummy) So sentimental it might as well be a bunch of wide-eyed street urchins collecting tin and selling war bonds to beat the Jerries. But so what; they don’t call it the Good War for nothing.
September
Lindsey Buckingham - Gift of Screws (Reprise) “On the one hand, I’ve got this large machine,” the California rocker explains. “And then on the other hand, I’ve also had this small machine. And I’ve been very fortunate to have both of those and to have those support each other. One serves as a palate cleanser for the other. You know, we all make choices in life. And I think I’ve been very lucky with those choices. Whether they were conscious or just the fate that was cast upon me — however you want to look at it, I think my karma as an artist and as a man has been pretty good. This is the best time of my life right now. So hopefully I did something right.” - Lindsey Buckingham, 2011
“Karma call, scam likely” - Elucid, 2026
If the comparisons between Buckingham and the co-Armand Hammer quoted above end with a shared contemplation of cosmic justice (and a tendency towards soundscapes when operating outside their respective bands), the rapping about karma is enough to bind them both within the rich tradition of middle-aged men interrogating the cards dealt them like they were tarot. In the chorus of “Bel Air Rain,” Fleetwood Mac’s chief songwriter does a solid approximation of Sinead O’Connor “Mandinka” wail. If he applies it to “rain,” as opposed to O’Connor’s “shame,” that too has something to do with a different interpretation of the weather (i.e. fate). Pretty much everywhere else on Gift of Screws, the guitars sound like God’s own rain (if God was a bit more intentional in his design).
October
The Dead C - Secret Earth (Ba Da Bing Records) When I was 15 or 16, my mom bought me the Dead C’s Trapdoor Fucking Exit, which, in retrospect, is pretty wild. Whatever might have inspired her to introduce New Zealand freedom rock into my world, the result was not that I all of a sudden developed a taste for avant-improv skronk but more that I integrated songs like “Hell Is Now Love” into my already established love of pop-punk. Art shmart; It’s all Crimpshrine to me, babe. Just give me the hits. Secret Earth is maybe not the “best” Dead C album of the last 25 years, but it is all bangers (relatively speaking).
Kaiser Chiefs - Off With Their Heads (B-Unique / Universal Motown) The Iceman Cometh of, and about, indie landfill. Brutalist-ically scathing pub rock for self-loathing Oasis fans. Fun, biting, fun; with more than enough forays into lyrical/melodic bittersweetness to keep us on the band’s side.
Nothing People - Anonymous / Late Night / Soft Crash (s-s records) Pick any one of the albums, released between 2008 and 2010, by this aptly named bunch of long-gone Cali weirdos. When I say it’s a hypnagogic cocktail of Roxy sleaze and Grifters slush, you can either take my word for it (not streaming anywhere, not even YouTube), buy on iTunes, or shell out $5 whole dollars to s-s records for two out of three of the vinyl. They had 4th LP in 2011 and if you want to track down Captcha fuckin’ Records to try to find it, you go ahead and go for it.
January
Clockcleaner - Ready 2 Fight (Fan Death) As discussed, the last years of the first decade were pretty depressing as far as rock music went. A good illustration of the draught was that when Philadelphia's skinhead-Swans outfit, Clockcleaner, opened for Negative Approach in 2008 and proceeded to troll the aging hardcore purists in attendance by playing a fifteen minute version of NA’s signature battle tune—and performing it so glacially that you’d have thought it was the Fever Ray album that got so many critics in their feelings—the story of the show became instant lore for all of us who had nothing else to talk about. Months later, Fan Death Records released the live recording as a 12”, and dang if it doesn’t hold up; less as provocation and more as a piece of Spaceman 3 meditation. Think of it as a piece of history, or as John Sharkey III’s proto-Dark Blue bliss-depressive anti-totalitarianism. Either way, when the fifteen-minute and five-seconds mark comes up and the first coherent words of the set, “What’s up. Fight me,” are uttered, followed by a literal mic drop, it's a beautiful thing. For cinema magic out of Philadelphia; only Rocky, Rocky 2, and Bill Burr Vs. Tweeter Center of Camden come close.
Fever Ray - s/t (Rabid) Starting as it does with imagery which encompasses foresters, boomerangs, the sea, needy dogs, houseplants, the sea again, and crawling, Karin Drijer’s first solo album kind of does a critic’s work for them. She’d never be so trite as moonbeams or falling stars (or if she does, it’s when she’s tuning her vocals down to massage level, so the listener can be forgiven for missing it), but those are there too. For something that critics, not being well versed in earth science I guess, described as “glacial,” it all goes by as fast as things you remember and, yeah, fine, it can also be that sad. But also, on “Triangle Walks,” Fever Ray condenses all the whistling, affirmational thrills, and pyrotechnics of The Bridge on the River Kwai (minus the racism/English-can-do-spirit propaganda) down to four minutes and twenty three seconds. With no disrespect to long war movies, think of all the living that gives you.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It’s Blitz! (Interscope) For both personal and aesthetic reasons, the YYYs are my favorite of all the New Rock Revolutionaries. People fail to appreciate the miracle of a no wave crooner/provocateur, a no-wave-by-way-of-heavy-metal guitarist, and a no wave jazzbo drummer becoming one of the most popular bands in the world. WITH A BALLAD. Not that people don’t appreciate the YYYs, they of course do, but they don’t appreciate their strange greatness (or great strangeness if you prefer) enough, probably because people are fucking idiots. Within the YYYs miracle, my personal faves are probably Show Your Bones and Is Is, but I won’t make the mistake of blowing against the wind of this electro-crash-out masterwork.
April
Bat For Lashes - Two Suns (Echo / Parlophone) "Peak political irreality. Hypernormalization at the end of empire. Our bodies in a constant state of confusion and volatility for confusion’s sake. Blind obedience as the only game in town. It’s hard to imagine there was a time before poptimism, before toxic fandom culture started behaving like the upper echelons of a Soviet-era vassal state, complete with life-ruining consequences for the slightest deviation from total fealty. If you found yourself kicking against the groupthink—insisting that, actually, some of these records just don’t sound good—you were told your ears were wrong. No, she’s the Joni Mitchell of our time. Get with it. Music once designated as disposable “trash bops” for a normie’s Ibiza holiday could suddenly garner prestige praise with an audacious press release: “The Vengabus single is an innovative weaving of early Detroit futurist techno with post-metal atmospherics and the DIY ethos of D.C. hardcore.”
Sinéad O’Connor may have been the last true pop star: fearless, visionary, a master of sound and image, blurring gender and collapsing the distance between underground and mainstream. She embodied the form completely—until she touched the third rail on Saturday Night Live, tearing up a photo of Pope John Paul II and urging viewers to “fight the real enemy.” The industry excommunicated her, and with it, something essential vanished. Of course, this wasn’t the first death of pop. It never is.
In the Fall of 2006, with two breakout records from two English women emerging out of indie scenes, the pop star re-emerged in a form that felt respectable and dangerous: Back to Black and Fur and Gold. Substance and style, reunited.
Bat for Lashes’ debut was something rare. But if there was any doubt, Two Suns—fully formed, shimmering, self aware—erased it.
Two Suns is a concept album in the way a mirror is a concept: less about narrative than about doubling, splitting, catching yourself in the act of becoming someone else, and then giving that fractured image a name: Pearl. She’s a cosmic blonde, femme fatale who’s equal parts menacing and tragic. In lesser hands, this kind of alter-ego play can come off as cynical, like someone working themselves out of writer’s block. On Two Suns, it’s something stranger, and truer.
Natasha Khan’s Pearl/Bat binary could have easily read like a LiveJournal entry set to autoharp over linn drum beats. But you can hear Kate Bush Hounds of Love-era in the architecture. But where Bush spirals skyward, Khan drags the heavens down into the body: breath, pulse, bruise.
Her real trick is restraint. A melody rises, promises resolution—catharsis, release—and then refuses it. It hovers. Withholds. Forces you to sit in the wanting. If you’ve ever loved someone who exists in two incompatible forms, you recognize the feeling.
If the late aughts were defined by blissed-out detachment or ironic remove, this is what it sounded like when someone refused both and chose full psychic entanglement." — Zohra Atash, Azar Swan, NYC
May
Destino Final - Atrapados (La Vida Es Un Mus) The reverb on the vocals of this d-beat outré-classic is still reverbing, with countless acts being swept up in its repeating call; using the template as both inspiration and/or cheatsheet. I’m excited for the aliens under distant stars who’ll hear the echo 1,000,000,000 years after our own star is as dead as a Discharge-ian dove.
June
Paintbox - Trip, Trance & Traveling (HG Fact) Paintbox’s late guitarist (Hiroyuki Kishida, AKA “Chelsea”) is generally seen as the patron saint of Burning Spirit Japanese hardcore. That genre is partially defined by the man’s singular style; Iron Maiden and ‘70s psych gorgeousness, layered upon itself, and played at a breakneck speed. Trip, Trance & Traveling, released after Chelsea’s death, is seen by many as Burning Spirit’s eccentric, kind-of masterpiece. I say “kind of,” as it’s not necessarily the album that the punks return to the most (it’s got a lot of weird parts) so much as it’s the album everybody has a favorite song from and which they all just sort of agree that it’s a masterpiece. As for my household, my wife sees Chelsea’s guitar playing as a middle ground between David Gilmour and Slayer, and I’m inclined to agree. I don’t listen to the whole hour of Japanese hardcore mixed with j-pop, traditional drumming, and circus-tent-on-fire polyphonic madness on the regular but, when the peculiar mood hits me, there's nothing else like it.
August
The xx - xx (Young Turks) In 2009, I was way too filled with grievance, both jealous and aesthetically legit, to give this London indie trio a chance. Looking back, it’s hard to imagine any soul so wracked with a poisonous sense of failure that this collection of minimalist-but-tuff grace couldn’t have whipped it right back into shape. That’s hindsight for you. If I could mail, via time travel, thirty-something me this CD, w/thirty-eight minutes of spare time attached, I would. Who knows; maybe I’d have become President, maybe I’d have died in a bathroom, maybe Lit would’ve stayed open. Hard to say!
September
Visqueen - Message To Garcia (Local 638 Records) Rachel Flotard has done time backing Neko Case and as a member of the Fastbacks. The singer/guitarist is extremely good at crafting perfect pop-rock gems. Despite this talent, she ain’t as well known as she should be, whatever “should be” might mean in an industry that hasn’t historically run on merit. Anyway, this is the third Visqueen album. Upon its release, a lot of nerds like me loved its Cheap Kix-ian hookery and unquenchable lust for life. Then that was that. I don't overvalue hardwork, or give too much of a shit about paying dues. But those two things, especially when paired with songwriting as inspired as it is sturdy, are virtues. And, as the story of these years is filled with hacks who thrived in defiance of both good taste and eventual divine judgement, I choose to believe that there is a timeline where Flotard is eating golden steak off of platinum records and sitting on a throne made of Jared Leto’s bones.
The Hex Dispensers - Winchester Mystery House (Douchemaster Records) Rough hewn Texas pulp-punk made by groovy goulies. Teenagers From Mars so romantic and doomed you can’t help but care about them. If this country was worth a single damn, we’d replace the national anthem with “My Love Is A Bat.”
The Chasm - Farseeing the Paranormal Abysm (Luxinframundis Productions) Much like the Chapel of Disease album (mentioned later on this list), I don’t really understand how this is Death Metal. I mean, I intellectually understand that Entomb’s Wolverine Blues happened (and I’m very glad it did… don’t @ me about my being a poseur, as I don’t care) but, still, this Mexico-to-Chicago outfit just sounds like galloping horses and flash floods to me. They should call this “pastoral mishap, but all in all a good death” metal instead. It’s “brutal” I guess, but no more so than the aforementioned natural occurrences. Well, I’m sure Daniel Corchado knows what he’s doing. Sure does make some gorgeous sounds come out of his very much alive guitar.
Night Fever - New Blood (Adult Crash) Night Fever are flagbearers of K-Town hardcore (No, there isn’t a vibrant Korea Town punk scene in Denmark… Copenhagen is spelled “København”), as they make clear on “This is Copenhagen.” Gun to my head, could I tell you why this album still kills like death and nearly all the other ‘80s hardcore revivalism of the time is justifiably forgotten? Nope. Well, actually I can. It's the drums, which are crisper than God’s own lettuce, and it’s Salomon Segers’ voice, which spiritually resembles a skateramp.
Blacklist - Midnight of the Century (Wierd Records) Album opener, “Still Changes,” starts with the “Rebel Girl/I Am The Resurrection" beat but, distrusting the easiest path, cuts it in half at the ten second mark. What follows is the far trickier proposition of Big Guitar grandness, Cult-ish c’mon c’mon rocking, Simple Mind-ing (but never simple minded) shimmer funk, and lyrics of complexified class war sung out with enough dark angel sincerity that they resonate even to the furthest bat cave cheap seats.
Without using this list (or band) as an opportunity to settle scores, I must point out that Wierd Records, and label owner Pieter Schoolworth’s accompanying weekly party of the same name, was, for years, the standard bearer of NYC goth. That the label/scene has been supplanted in hipster goth memory by other (to be clear, entirely swell… for the most part…) NYC/LA labels/scenes has as much to do with Wierd not being goth in order to make friends (or hire publicists) as anything. By 2010, all scenes were to be referred to as “communities.” Those who found that designation to be fundamentally utopian and/or dishonest would find out soon enough how much communities are defined as much by who is exiled as by who gets a symphony hall named after them.
Of course, having said all that, it’s also possible that I simply don’t understand what it is that people, on a mass scale, like. Around this time, Wierd Records put out Dust On Common, the excellent Led Er Est album, and nobody cared. A few years later, Sacred Bones put out The Diver, another excellent Led Er Est album, and the same amount of nobody cared. So maybe people just think REDACTED* makes better music. Which, to me, is a wild supposition. But the numbers are not on my side.
*no reason to hurt anyone’s feelings just for making likable mid-tier synth-pop music that doesn’t do much for me.
Antipop Consortium - Fluorescent Black (Big Dada) First off, the hyperlink to the album doesn’t go to the album as it isn’t streaming or for sale anywhere. I assume they have their reasons, so the link just goes to Beans’ Bandcamp page, so you can send him some money just to say, “thanks, Beans.”
That out of the way, it’s funny listening to some albums which were considered “difficult” in the Aughts and hearing how propulsive and accessible they sound now. Obviously part of the reason for that is the sheer amount of brush the innovators cleared, making a way for the noiseniks and hyperpopsters who followed. But it’s also hard not to think we, collectively, were pretty soft; ourselves clearing the larger way for all the glop, slop, and slurry which was already there but stays hungry. It’s not like Fluorescent Black is going to be confused for a party record anytime soon, except that it kind of is. At least as much as the copy of White Light/White Heat that Lester Bangs used to play to bum out party guests which, as you’re reading this, is the oldie soundtrack to a lil’ future hipster being conceived in a $2,500 a month apartment in Ridgewood.
October
Rowland S. Howard - Pop Crimes (Liberation / Fat Possum) As it was released just a few months before he died, it’s tempting to ascribe an air of pre-emptive self-mourning to Rowland S. Howard’s last hurrah. It’s further tempting to see—in his cemetery tango cover of Talk Talk’s “Life’s What You Make It” just for starters—a pitch black ironicism in the proceedings. Consider it a testament to the talents of the Birthday Party/These Immortal Souls’ guitarist (and oft Lydia Lunch collaborator) that those temptations are based on what we know more than what’s felt while listening. Because Pop Crimes sounds like its 2009 release must have been a reissue, or a discovery of long-lost tapes. It sounds like a wastrel in his prime, positively pissing vinegar. It sure as hell doesn’t sound like the last recording of a man who was about to die of liver cancer. OK, maybe the vocals sound doomed, but he sounded that way when he wrote “Shivers” at the age of 16. More importantly than that, the guitars burn hard and alive enough that apothecaries from the dark ages, if they weren’t so dumb, could have used them to treat leprosy.
February
Sade - Soldier of Love (Epic) Sade offer up their heaviest album. Which isn’t maybe what some people want from Sade, but the times are the times they are, and I for one am grateful for it (for the Sade album, not the hardness of the times). Ms. Adu has never been anything less than clear eyed about love and the world both, and she’s not gonna lie to us; the smoothness of her music has always been incidental to its genius.
March
Ludicra - The Tenant (Profound Lore) Ludicra was an Exhumed bassist named Ross “the boss” (no, not that one) Sewage, a revered drummer named after an aphorist who, for a time, sidelined as the only good blogger, a classicist heart of gold guitarist from Hammers of Misfortune, another guitarist who’s a black metal wunderkind ironically named “Christy,” and, on vocals, an aural manifestation of the concept of “the weather.” Together these elements made one of the greatest USBM albums ever, and let the record show that they didn’t need an ounce of anything cascadian to do it.
V/A - Choubi Choubi! Folk And Pop Songs From Iraq (Sublime Frequencies) Sublime Frequencies has had a somewhat mixed reputation amongst both “world” music aficionados and citizens/diaspora members of said world, even before the scene got woked enough to posit that maybe “world music” was a super dumb genre name that has decidedly othering under, over, and in-between tones. Indulging in my privilege (and, no, I’m not being cutesy ironic… it is privilege!) to set those issues aside for our purposes, I’ll focus on this rambunctious fucker. Released a decade in of our invasion/occupation, Choubi Choubi! compiles a variety of artists performing a range of Iraqi musical styles (that it’s all under the auspices of “Choubi” is one of the frequent Frequencies issues we’re struggling to set aside as to get to the praise). Like its 2013 sequel, Choubi Choubi! is double LP in length, with surprisingly few duds. What it is overflowing with is tumbling beats, clattering electro, more crew vocals than a Connecticut straight-edge show in 1989, and some of the catchiest dance music of both the time when the songs were made and of the time when circumstances called for their preservation (imperialist as those circumstances and imperfect as that preservation might have been).
Side Note: Omar Souleyman’s first (and excellent) wide-distribution albums were released by Sublime Frequencies around this time. Through no fault of his own, Souleyman has sometimes been used as an example by the those who accuse the various reissue labels of Orientalism (I once was deejaying one of Souleyman’s songs at Beauty Bar and a Syrian expat came up to complain that I was playing music by a CIA plant), so it’s worth reading New Line Magazine’s Hassan Hassan to get his view of the Syrian singer and the surrounding issues. https://newlinesmag.com/argument/how-rural-music-in-the-middle-east-bypassed-cultural-gatekeepers-using-tech-and-weddings/
June
Young Offenders - Leader Of The Followers (Deranged Records) Sometimes a punk band will have one release that feels so much itself that—especially if it’s the strangest of a catalog—it’s hard to know if the musicians are expressing originality intentionally or if they’re instead just not musically competent enough to express the boring ideas in their head. And that inability to get their fingers to make the chords required to accurately rip off, say, the Clash mistranslates boring ideas into something fresh. Pretty sure that’s not what happened here; these guys are all SF punk lifers, with chops enough to do a Rancid if they felt like it—and tbc the rest of their catalog is real nice & moped-y takes on Ruts/Stiff Little Fingers—but still there’s a bracing oddness to these eight-songs-in-thirteen-minutes otherwise absent in their usual anthemics. And, weirdly, the result of all the start-stop and digressive aggression is almost nothing but anthems, like they decided to push up the bass, the treble, and then disregard the notion of verses entirely, leaving nothing but the post-punkiest of don’t-bore-us, get-to-the… And then the album is done, leaving everyone wanting more from everything.
July
Super Wild Horses - Fifteen (HoZac) Gang of Two from Garageland, AUS who decided to make something happen, and then did. Primitivist slashing and Bay City rolling, splashing around in honey and vinegar, that careens into art as often as it does into pop.
September
Tamaryn - The Waves (“No label for this album. All profit goes to the artist!”) First big ‘n’ mood-swinging crest and crash of the second wave of shoegaze. Never vague, uncompromising in it's own fashion and, while sporting elegant melodies like crazy, never pretty for pretty's sake alone. Respect is due.
Also, Sexy Rexy from VUE plays on it. VUE were good as hell, and anyone who says different can get fucked. (Tamaryn too is good as hell, but she doesn't need me to tell anyone who says different what they can do. If they don't know by now, they can ask somebody.)
Robert Plant - Band of Joy (Decca, Rounder) Like Emmylou Harris and Sally Timms, Robert Plant’s is a song interpreter as much as anything. So when he’s allowed to arrange, ponder, and then wail his way straight to Jericho, it’s a treat. If I was channeling that kind of power through my chest, I wouldn’t button my shirts either. On Band of Joy, thee mighty lemon dripper gets frisky on songs by Los Lobos, Richard Thompson, Townes Van Zandt and—doing his part to keep Stereogum’s lights on—Low. I don’t know if Band of Joy is as iconic as his classic work with Phil Collins, but it’s as easy as Sunday morning to listen to. Occasionally, it’s as frighteningly sublime as listening to a loved one breathing in their sleep.
Screaming Females - Castle Talk (Don Giovani) If Screaming Females were often used as a cudgel in the interminable “rock is back! Guitar is dead!” wars of 2008-tbd, it’s the power trio’s own damn fault for rocking so smartly as to keep DIY-or-die-ers and musos (at least the non-idiot musos) in such a state of tizzy that it was impossible not to name drop "Marissa Paternoster" anytime any asshole claimed that this, that, or the other thing was dead. Rock, punk, whatever you got; Paternoster’s guitar brings that shit back to life like it was her Frankenstein's monster to doctor.
Deskonocidos - En La Oscuridad (Todo Destruido / Trabuc Records) Death rock guitar heroics all over the place, plus a hella boss Paralisis Permanente cover. You can find copies in every punk distro, to the point where I bet you could get one of ‘em to pay you to take a dozen off their hands. I don’t know why tho, seeing as the LP is wall-to-wall phantasmagoria and jaunty dread. Again, comes back to the whole “people are idiots” thing. So take advantage. Buy enough copies to make furniture and, whenever you wear one copy out (which you will), just pull another one out of the ottoman.
Swans - My Father Will Guide up a Rope to the Sky (Young God) I’m of the minority opinion that it’s perfectly acceptable to listen to Swans with the lights on, at a reasonable volume, while doing unSwans-y things like petting your cat or doing a nice puzzle. I mean, they went from being a slow hardcore band to being a very loud folk rock band. That’s not a diminishment of either era and there’s no need to be precious about it. M Gira might get mad at the notion that The Burning World is a decent Swans album, but Gira’s rage isn’t my problem and he’s done pretty well off being upset, so my saying so is a win-win situation all around. This particular duckling, which came out fourteen years after Swans’ previous studio album, is better than Burning World. Maybe even better than The Great Annihilator (I go back and forth) but mainly it’s just pleasurable to listen to. If I’m in the mood, I can get down with any era of Gira’s boogie-woogie pathologies, but My Father is a particularly sweet midway point between the darkness-to-be-endured ‘80s stuff and the transcendence-to-be-endured of all the stuff that came after (or at least everything that came after To Be Kind, which is pretty funk-rockin’).
Sun City Girls - Funeral Mariachi (Abduction Records) In my anecdotal experience, when a person finds themself involuntarily bristling at another group of guys with “girl” in their band name, the person is rarely thinking of Sun City Girls. Mainly because, typically, persons are rarely thinking of Sun City Girls, but also Sun City Girls—though they were made up of a pretty unambiguous “Alan,” “Charles,” and “Richard”—never really registered as male. Or gendered. Or terrestrial. While in retrospect, it makes perfect sense that they’d be from Arizona (and real freaky-rocker state if there was one), I recall being surprised to find that out. Not because I thought they were from somewhere else but because it just never occurred to me that the music the trio made came from anywhere at all. Not, like, ancient alien shit; theirs is a catalog deeply, if idiosyncratically, rooted (with much love to migratory impulses) in all the stuff that can only come with spending a few million years in the sea and then slorping one’s way onto pangea to check out the local scene. In this case, it turns out the local scene was the borderless spaghetti southwest (specifically Phoenix), and then expanding outwards. But it could’ve as easily started in Atlantis, Lemuria, or one of the hundred velvety vestibules shifting around in the Winchester Mystery House (bang! bang!).
PS. I know this might be considered by heads to be baby’s first Sun City Girls album, but that’s me; I’m baby.
October
V/A - Brutales Matanzas (Cintas Pepe) A punk comp as important as They Don’t Get Paid, They Don’t Get Laid… or Let Them Eat Jellybeans. According to the label, this comp was “a polaroid of what was happening in México and Perú around in the late 00's.” If accurate, and by all accounts the description is 100% accurate, all the bands involved are more heroic than all the troops that ever served in any country and/or empire ever, since the beginning of recorded history. And, unlike those wuss troops, all these heroes achieved their greatness on a recording budget of minus dollars. I ordered multiple copies and whenever my copy would get stolen en route, I’d order another. I’d be fine if I was still ordering copies to this day. This album is just that out of hand. It'd take too much space to give each band justice so I’ll shorthand comparisons for a few of the bands that’d go on to make equally boss albums and say: Los Monjo - Stooges, Morbo - Spits/Ramones (all their records are DELIGHTFUL), Crimen - Oi! Death rock (their full length is VERY IMPORTANT), Inservibles - the Beatles, but better.
Further Reading: https://shit-fi.com/tercer-mundo
Kylesa - Spiral Shadow (Season of Mist) The problem with 99% of all sludge metal is that it’s hardly ever Eyehategod. For a sludge metal band, this is a problem which is damn near insurmountable. Historically, this Savannah crust-adjacent sort tabled that concern by having two drummers (which Eyehategod—lucky to have even one living drummer—typically didn’t), and by having a lady handling half the vocal duties (which, dispositionally, was unlikely to ever happen with Eyehategod). Still, good as Kylesa was, and as great as 2009’s Static Tensions was, them not being New Orleans ne’er-do-wells (or even as convincingly sketchy as Weedeater) was a problem that persisted; calling into question why the band insisted on being slow, syruppy metal at all, when they coulda been one of best—if considerably more financially insolvent—American crust bands. Well, the “fuck you” is on all us doubters as, on Spiral Shadow, Klyesa solved the problem by keeping the heft of sludge and the pungent, galloping spirit of crust, and leaving all the other tropes of either sub-genre behind in favor of heavy, heavy psych interwoven with an almost devotional melodicism. The band’s songs still sound like wild & wooly mammoths, but now they sound song-ier and more unpredictable; like mammoths draped in silk finery, with long dangly earrings that shine in the sun as the songs flap their big mammoth-y ears.
November
Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy (Roc-A-Fella / Def Jam) I guess Yeezus is more interesting, if only for the brief moment in time when it was rumored that it was being co-written with the drummer for Rainer Maria. But Yeezus also has the disadvantage of sounding like something that’d have come out on Gold Standard Laboratories or Dim Mak in 2004. That said, not including Ye feels—far more than omitting Radiohead, who still haven’t topped “Fake Plastic Trees”—like the contrarianism/trolling that used to be the default accusation against heretics*. So… this emotional mess’ll do until a mess with better rapping gets here. Maybe every pussy put in the sarcophagus someday comes back. And, to be fair, the new wave and nü wavey sounds are neat-o, and Ye was nothing if not culturally prescient in how he sublimated nothing.
*I’m not casting myself as a martyr. As a niche character, few have ever paid me much mind. Plus, as received wisdom has proven to be no more profitable than any EOY lists determined by Tarot, and as fandom has decided the true measure of artistic merit is determined by metrics like streaming numbers and/or how much $$$ an artist can get to perform at any given despot’s Purgemitzvah, nobody—except 14 year old BTS/Swift fans, and some spiritually deviant adults—cares what us critics do anymore.
Thanks for reading. Next installment, 2011-2015, coming soon. In the meantime, please share and subscribe and/or please subscribe to CREEM Magazine so I can continue to pay rent and eat food.
