Without apology I present the top ten albums (plus a few ties) of the first ten years of the 2000’s:
10:
Gnarls Barkley: St. Elsewhere
tied with:
Sebastien Grainger: Sebastien Grainger & the Mountains
9:
At the Drive-In: Relationship of Command
tied with:
Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson: Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson
8:
The Shins: Chutes Too Narrow
7:
Bloc Party: Silent Alarm
6:
The Strokes: Is This It?
5:
Spoon: Gimme Fiction
4:
Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf
3:
Iron & Wine: Our Endless Numbered Days
2:
Andrew Bird: The Mysterious Production of Eggs
1:
White Stripes: Elephant
tied with:
Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
i prefer andrew bird’s armchair apocrypha to mysterious production. i’ll come up with more disagreements soon.
a lot of people do, i think, but i think without Mysterious Production he never would have been able to make Armchair. listening to the progression from Weather Systems on you can see his sound expanding, and MPoE is where it all clicked, I think. plus i listened to the album 72 times straight before listening to anything else when it first came out.
for instance: beirut?
i like Beirut. Their first album would probably rate somewhere between 25-50 for me in the top 50
Glad to see At the Drive In up there. I haven’t listened to that album in way too long. I’m listening to it now.
I love At the Drive-In, man! Apparently they are considering getting back together. I never got as in to their other bands after the split. But I listen to all the AtDI stuff often. And watch the dvd that came with the anthology a few years back!
Thanks for this Ryan. I don’t really know any of these bands. People make fun of me for being out of it and listening to the Talking Heads. I’ve gotten into Deerhoof, are any of these bands like them or Magnetic Fields?
I love the Talking Heads, so don’t let ’em make you feel bad about that. I’d say you might dig Sebastien Grainger, maybe Bloc Party. There were a lot album that were very hard to leave off this list like TV On The Radio’s Return to Cookie Mountain and either of the last two Modest Mouse albums, both bands you might dig.
Ditto on the Talking Heads– Remain in Light is an exquisite album! Greg, do you listen to The Arcade Fire? You might like them…
That Bloc Party album is really catchy. I used to play it a lot when it first came out. But I disliked A Weekend in the City so much that I stopped listening to them. What have they been doing these days?
Ryan, how would you rank these albums? They would definitely go in my top ten list:
Feels, Animal Collective
Shut Up I am Dreaming, Sunset Rubdown
You Forgot it in People, Broken Social Scene
s/t, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah
Michael, somewhere between 10-25 would house Clap Your Hands Say Yeah’s first album as well as the first Arcade Fire album. I have to say I’ve never gotten into BSS or Sunset Rubdown although I know a lot of people who dig them. I’m kind of on the fence about Animal Collective. I like them but I’ve never felt blown away by them.
also, A Weekend in the City was a shit album. Have you heard the castoffs from it though? Man they shelved the wrong songs. Their latest album, Intimacy was pretty good, though.
Ryan: Oh I know TV and Modest Mouse. Got it. Found White Stripes and another Iron and Wine-Creek Drank the Cradle.
Michael: Oh yes, I have the Arcade Fire and yeah Animal Collective might need to figure in this too. Youtube has all these old clips of the Heads in Germany. Pretty nice. I’m kind of happy Byrne refused one of those ‘let’s make money tours.’
you can’t go wrong with anything in the catalogs of the White Stripes or Iron & Wine!
I don’t sees Fiery Furnace’s Blueberry Boat nowheres!!!
Sorry, EC!