The Top 50 Albums of the 2000s: 40-36

40 | DUSTY KID A Raver’s Diary
Kompakt, 2009

DOWNLOAD | “America” (The Director’s Cut), 12-inch Edit

There aren’t too many records that came out this year on the list. That is, obviously, because I don’t have the benefit of hindsight; if it came out in 2009, I’d barely have the chance to get sick of it before I could rediscover it. But I will make the rare exception for Dusty Kid because — well, let me count the ways. First of all, Paolo Alberto Lodde has only been making records since 2005. Generally, techno producers wait something like ten years to make a full-length record, and even when they do, most don’t reach the heights and ambition of A Raver’s Diary. Which brings me to my second point: He called the album A Raver’s Diary — a self-deprecative nod that he repeats with song titles that poke fun of his own work, like “Here Comes The Techno.” When was the last time a minimal techno artist made me laugh? Umm, never. So this desire to take things not-so-goddamn-seriously is precisely why, in my third point, I couldn’t deny Dusty Kid this position: He is a risk-taker whose top friends on MySpace include Midlake, Bob Dylan, and Simon & Garfunkel. And he is definitely the only guy in this decade to release a 17-minute track on his album (“America”) only to follow it up with a 12-inch Extended Version. That’s good for Top 40 status alone.

39 | FEIST The Reminder
Cherrytree/Interscope, 2007

VIDEO | “I Feel It All”

It was my album of the year in 2007, and all things considered, The Reminder is aging quite well. It gets harder to judge a record once one of its singles becomes as ubiquitous as “1234” turned out to be, but even if that song had never been written, the material on this album stands timeless largely for its sheer simplicity. “I Feel It All,” for example, is essentially three barre chords in drop-D tuning; I could teach my 12-year-old godson (and resident Rock Band expert) how to play it in an afternoon. But what makes this song — and, indeed, the entire record — so resistant to criticism is that it’s so entirely a Feist album that it’s difficult to even conceive anyone else writing it. As a musician, this is most likely the greatest compliment.

38 | EMBRACE If You’ve Never Been
Virgin, 2001

DOWNLOAD | “Over”

If You’ve Never Been is, on some level, Embrace’s lost album. It’s the album that no one bought, the album that convinced their label to drop them, and the album that sent the band looking for day jobs until their unexpected comeback in 2004. So what happened? We can start with a seven-minute album opener called “Over” — which, if you didn’t know any better, almost sounds like the band knew its first run of fame was, well, over — and the dark cloud that threatened to absorb the entire record from there. In other words, If You’ve Never Been is so much of a downer that by the time we get to the moral of the story — “Happiness Will Get You In The End” — you’re just not buying it. The lyrics had already beaten us over the head with failure: We could have made it last, but you’ve gotta do more than that. Or, One day I’ll reach the top with you, and they’ll shoot me down for looking at the view. Or, Everyone has their shot and moves on. It was an album of such self-fulfilling prophecy that the only way to change things was go and write a record called Out Of Nothing and fill it with songs about rising up from the ashes. It wasn’t as good, but it did the trick.

37 | THE FIELD From Here We Go Sublime
Kompakt, 2007

VIDEO | “Over The Ice”

It came out on Kompakt, but From Here We Go Sublime never felt like a proper techno record. All of the genre signifiers are here, of course — four-to-the-floor kick drums underneath arpeggiated synths are in the building! — but the result is recognizably distinct in its hypnotic drive and ambient presence. In that sense, Axel Willner is probably a “trance” producer in the most literal sense of the term: Sublime is less an exercise in proper musical composition than it is one of loop-building and mood-making. It’s the first minimal techno record I’ve ever heard that, somehow, makes less sense for a club than it does for staring outside your window. Also, he created the entire album with a free modular software-based synthesizer that you can get online. That Willner cites both the Misfits and the Dead Kennedys as his formative musical influences, therefore, makes perfect sense.

36 | AIMEE MANN Lost In Space
Superego, 2002

VIDEO | “The Moth”

The Aimee Mann story was practically folklore by the time Lost In Space came out: P.T. Anderson’s prominent use of her work in the film Magnolia cemented Mann as An Artist People Actually Like, which was one big thumbed nose to the major label system that relegated her to has-been status way before her time. Lost In Space is the second album on Mann’s Superego label, but the first without input from Jon Brion. This was, in some ways, a risky maneuver — you can hear his fingerprint all over the Magnolia soundtrack — but the outcome was a less-effected version of a singer-songwriter whose strengths are almost more obvious without the bells and whistles. It’s a record about dissatisfaction and want, but more than that, it’s a record about stubborn resilience. “The moth don’t care when he sees the flame,” she observes, somewhat autobiographically. “He might get burned, but he’s in the game.” In case you’re wondering, that’s about as optimistic as Aimee Mann gets.