The Top 50 Albums of the 2000s: 5-2

5 | BASEMENT JAXX Rooty
Astralwerks, 2001

VIDEO | “Where’s Your Head At” (Live)

First of all, let’s just say that Remedy, the debut album from Basement Jaxx, was crazy improbable in that well-executed house albums are rare and a near-perfect synthesis of dancefloor credibility and mainstream approval was basically impossible before they did it. So how could Rooty be better? For one, it’s because “Where’s Your Head At” pre-dated the subsequent electro-house movement and conceptually surpassed it before the revival even started. It’s also because “Breakaway” is the best Chicago house track ever written by two Englishmen. But perhaps most naggingly, it’s because you get the feeling that the mood in the studio was not so much we hope you like our sophomore album as it was, “Fuck you! We did it again!”

4 | BJÖRK Vespertine
Elektra, 2001

DOWNLOAD | “Cocoon” (Demo)

In spite of its impressive selection of collaborators — LFO’s Mark Bell, Matmos, Matthew Herbert, and the Notwist’s Martin Gretschmann among them — Vespertine is, perhaps more than any other Björk record before or since, a more figurative solo album. It’s a record for isolationists and it sounds like it; that its first two songs are called “Hidden Place” and “Cocoon” only underscores this austere approach. When the album was released in 2001, Pitchfork’s Ryan Schreiber argued that it “failed to give electronic music the forward push it received on Björk’s preceding albums” — a claim that, somewhat inadvertently, presupposes electronic music as a medium that doesn’t fare well under subtlety. It’s amazing, then, that hindsight vindicates Vespertine as an album that did more for electronic music in the 2000s than almost any other; labels like Spectral Sound or Morr Music — and almost any electronic artist that works in the minimalist bracket — are likely to agree.

3 | THE NOTWIST Neon Golden
City Slang, 2002

VIDEO | “One With The Freaks”

When I saw the Notwist here in New York last year, Martin Gretschmann triggered all of his samples with a pair of Wii controllers — as if he were playing some sort of fucked up version of Rock Band without a TV. What’s worse, he’s arguably not the most talented or creative person in this band. It’s hard to write about Neon Golden without getting hyperbolic, and it’s basically futile to understate how this record redefined an otherwise nondescript German thrash group into a band of seers that seemingly woke up one morning and realized they could recontextualize German techno for a pop infrastructure, that they were capable of arranging orchestra sections, that they could render pathos from a colder Bauhaus–like perspective without the feigned indifference. It’s like the anything-is-possible album of the decade.

2 | IDA Will You Find Me
Tiger Style, 2000

DOWNLOAD | “Encantada”

In 1998, my band almost signed to a major label. At the end of a drawn-out bidding war, it was between Interscope and Capitol — both of which had their strengths and weaknesses. Then-Interscope president Tom Whalley didn’t seem to like it whenever I asked him about the bands on his label whose CDs were only 88 cents on St. Marks Place; he didn’t seem to take any of the responsibility for Interscope’s failures, but he was always so quick to claim credit for its superstars. Former Capitol president Gary Gersh was a bit more freewheeling and I liked him for that. When I told him that I didn’t hear a radio song coming from my band any time soon, he shrugged it off. “I invented the alternative rock format,” he laughed — and truthfully, he kind of did. (This was the guy who signed Nirvana to Geffen in 1990.) At any rate, my feelings were torn until, one day, I got a call from the Capitol A&R exec who wanted to sign our band. “I just signed Ida,” he told me. A few weeks later, we agreed to sign with him, too.

It’s not that we only wanted to be labelmates with Ida — even though we did — but there was a sense of kinship there that I could never put my finger on. I just knew that Ida weren’t going to roll over to make a commercial pop album, and Will You Find Me — with its experiments in dissonance and genre-bending, or their incomparable three-part harmonizing — simply validated that hunch. It was simultaneously the most studio-intensive and least radio-friendly record they’d ever made; had Capitol learned anything from OK Computer, they might have recognized this as a potentially viable option. In the end, neither band got far enough to find out: My band broke up before signing that contract and Ida were dropped from the label shortly after turning this album in.

Dear Capitol Records executives from 1999: You are fucking crazy if you think this album wasn’t worth releasing.