The Top 50 Albums of the 2000s: 50-46

Before we begin, a disclaimer: This is a very personal list. There are objective opinions that, perhaps, contributed to my decisions regarding this list, but for the most part, this is about looking through my album library and being honest with myself. It’s about what I actually liked in the last ten years, and not what I “should have” liked.

Lists like these are often more big-picture than self-reflexive, and as far as possible, I wanted to stray from that blueprint. Something about every one of these fifty records moved my life forward in some small way; thumbing through a decade’s worth of record collecting — half of which exists in a tangible medium, the other half on a hard drive — I inevitably found myself thinking about those people, places, and things that helped. I also thought about “the big picture,” but a disclaimer such as this one is more concerned with clarifying the relationship between a so-called “important” record and a record that might only be important to me. That is to say, the governing principle of this list can be thoroughly explained in a sentence: Because I said so.

50 | UNDERWORLD Everything Everything
Junior Boys Own/V2, 2000

VIDEO | “Jumbo” (Live)

One of my final memories of the 1990s took place at the Riviera Theater in Chicago, where Underworld performed for what seemed like all night; the whole night, in fact, a literal blur as I remember only movement — from the band, from the audience, from myself. I had never been to a live show in which the ceiling was as much a focal point as the stage, nor where I’d ever felt so truly in the moment. And I was completely sober. Everything Everything is the only live album of the decade I still return to: partially to relive the moment, and partially to remember what happened in the first place.

49 | DEFTONES White Pony
Maverick, 2000

VIDEO | “Change (In the House of Flies)”

Being a hard rock band in the late ’90s was tough. There didn’t seem to be much room for you unless you neatly fit on either end of the teen-pop/nü-metal dichotomy, and radio preferred it, in fact, if you fell some place in between. The Deftones got a bad rap for being “rap-metal” — that is, in spite of the fact that they didn’t really rap — so White Pony was somewhat of a revelation. It was the stake in the ground that reclaimed their identity as the only band in the world that could pay authentic homage to both Cocteau Twins and Slayer in the same song. Ironically, later editions included “Back To School (Mini Maggit),” if only to prove that the Deftones would have been the best rap-metal band ever — if that was, indeed, what they had ever intended to be.

48 | ISOLÉE We Are Monster
Playhouse, 2005

DOWNLOAD | “Do Re Mi”

By the time Rajko Müller released We Are Monster in 2005, his alter ego Isolée had already established a solid crossover between the minimal techno environment of his primary label, Playhouse, and the Chicago house veterans that embraced the “Brazil.com” single that Derrick Carter issued for his Classic Records label. That genre-bending formula crystallized on this, Müller’s second full-length, which took its cues from the New York ’70s underground (“Schrapnell”), ’80s electro and freestyle (“Jelly Baby_ Fish”), and of course, proper acid house (“Do Re Mi”). If the gap between deep house and techno got smaller over the last five years, I’d argue this record had something to do with it.

47 | ATHLETE Tourist
Parlophone/Astralwerks, 2005

VIDEO | “Half Light”

I was staying in London when Tourist came out and the vibe among the locals was derisory. It was, “I liked Athlete better when they sounded like Beta Band.” Or, “They sound like Coldplay now.” As is usually the case, the rest of the country disagreed with my friends, and — if only for a moment, anyway — Athlete were kind of huge. In retrospect, Tourist wasn’t the drastic departure everyone thought; there were just a hella lot of full-orchestra arrangements that we weren’t prepared for at the time. Of all the records on this list, Tourist might go down as the most deliberately anthemic. I’m fairly confident we’ll all recognize this as a good thing someday.

46 | LUCINDA WILLIAMS West
Lost Highway, 2007

DOWNLOAD | “West”

If Blood On The Tracks is the quintessential break-up album, then Lucinda Williams upped the ante with West — a miserably exquisite exploration of love lost paired with the death of her mother. There’s pretty much no way of getting around this raw nerve: The album’s thematic centerpiece, the conceptual duo of “Unsuffer Me” and “Everything Has Changed,” offers a bleak portrait of bloodletting — “My joy is dead,” she sings — but by album’s end, a hint of graceful resignation appears. “I know you won’t stay permanently,” she concludes, “but come out west and see.” It’s the most tender sentiment of her thirty-year career.