33 rebellions per minute
BEST MUSIC OF 2000
1. Loud Family, ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE
-- Tris McCall, IF ONE OF THESE BOTTLES SHOULD HAPPEN TO FALL
My subconscious has almost fully absorbed Scott Miller's view of how a writer should structure a worldview, what a melody should sound like, and how many new sounds should be brought into the universe to justify a song. It becomes easy to complain: "this year's album didn't re-explain the universe for me! It just has, like, 12 songs! And I don't even really like the second one! So it's only 91.7% perfect! Anyone could do that!". Indeed, it's lovely hearing Scott's sensibilities approached by someone younger, eager-er, more amused by his own intelligence, someone who's still half-convinced he's being joking when he sings "They've got you where you want you and it's all downhill from here". Tris also knows he's serious about loving his home state, serious about observing the people around him, and serious about willing to pay Scott Miller whatever pathetic producer salary Scott commands. But i listen to Scott in more-than-producer mode and remember "Oh. Yeah".
2. Modest Mouse, THE MOON AND ANTARCTICA
Like the aging sociologist in the Onion who announces that most American men have passed their deep need for more sex from their wives and have instead retreated to their basements playing with model trains and muttering "castrating bitch" under their breaths, ever since most American men caught their wives in an affair with an insurance salesman from Seattle, Modest Mouse sing of an angst that blurs the line between Isaac Brock's migraine and a universal disappointment in the flawed creator of flawed humanity. By fortifying their angular indie-rock with dynamics, symphonics, and an increasingly expressive vocal drawl, however, they make music which would justify pretentions far less well-written than their own.
3. Jim's Big Ego, NOPLACE LIKE NOWHERE
One of the least pretentious great albums ever made: sing-along folk, double-bass acoustic funk, a couple of intricate jokes, a Politically Correct feminism and anti-racism that also happens to be gentle and correct, and an intuitive supralogical awareness that one song's "You've got to be your own Prince Charming, you've got to ride your own stallion" doesn't diminish another song's promise that "You and i are gonna stay in love".
4. Nina Gordon, TONIGHT ND THE REST OF MY LIFE
My embrace in recent years of Scarlet, Emm Gryner, Kenickie's GET IN, and Julia Darling should've destroyed my indie credibility already, but they stayed obscure. Nina successfully parlayed gloss, a gorgeous mainstream singing voice, supple almost-mainstream melodies, and a near-complete sellout of her old band's rock rebellion into sales and radio success. I loved her old band; i love to see rock music done right; but any genre can be done right. Good for her.
5. Swinghammer, VOSTOK 6
Once upon a time, space travel was human destiny, computers were going to make the world more imaginative and more fractally beautiful, astronauts were romantic, and singers became singers because their voices were designed for it. Kurt Swinghammer is old enough to remember the future; i'm not, and i'm more than a little awed at his recreation of it.
6. Weakerthans, LEFT AND LEAVING
-- Dar Williams, THE GREEN WORLD
I've loved words since before i was kindergarten, flipping through polyglot dictionaries after preschool to find out 23 different language's words for "sweater". Dar Williams and John Samson both give every sign of starting the songwriting process by rolling experiences into phrases, lessons learned or struggled with into poems, and only then fitting the result to melodies. This results, though, in flowing melodies the wrong shape to ever be generic. Both artists have proven themselves electrifying rockers, so i started out resisting both albums for being needlessly slower and unforceful. Then i realized force was somewhere near the opposite of the point.
7. Fake Brain, DEPARTMENT OF OUR WAYS
-- Veruca Salt, RESOLVER
The year's best aggressive rock records dissect a bad romantic relationship that could almost be the same one. Fake Brain's Gideon, male, pinpoint the specific behaviors and pre-existing psychologies of both participants that doomed things from the start, and make a point of looking beyond to critique the rest of the world now and then; Veruca Salt's Louise Post, female, enumerates emotions and demonstrates the exact thin border between devotion and clinginess to which her man reacted with fear. Stereotypically, Fake Brain's most imaginative sonics are on their most aggressive songs, and Veruca's are on quiet detours.
8. Rheostatics, THE STORY OF HARMELODIA
Either the best children's story ever to disguise itself as a whimsical avant-garde folk-pop record, or vice versa, or both.
9. Fidget, GLAD TO BE YOUR ENEMY
-- Chris Knox, BEAT
When the term "pop music" gave up on "popular" as a root, sometime before Soundgarden became a jillion times as successful Martin Newell, it came to combine its old musical indicators (an emphasis on melodies, sparkling production, straightforward song structures) with the hookiness embedded in the pop of "snap, crackle". But if instead it had revised its roots around "populist", tunefulness played and sung by people of strikingly ordinary raw talent using ingenuity to conjure hooks and sheen from tiny budgets, then these two synthetic and mildly odd New Wave throwbacks would be exemplars of the form.
10. Home, XIV
Pop, in more overtly glorious ways, are also the ambitions of the 14th album by the founders of Screw Music Forever, a band whose first eleven albums, dissolutely inventive, virtually define the term "wibbly" (especially since i made the term up). Far more so than on DESERTER'S SONGS or THE SOFT BULLETIN, enough indie spirit remains among the symphonics that critics should have been slavering over this one. I'm a fan, not a critic, but if i have to make up the slavering gap, i guess i might as well start.
BEST SONGS OF 2000
(The other music reviewers i know design their Best Song lists by excluding all songs from their Best Albums. "Huh?", i've conventionally asked. "My favorite albums are there _because_ they have my favorite songs". But this year i give in; i want my round-up to feature more bands. But i still insist on taking my #1 Song Of The Year wherever i find it.)
1. Veruca Salt, "Disconnected"
Sometimes it's my Song Of The Year that chooses me. My 2000 would be better rendered by the work-world ambivalence of Tris McCall's "Lite Radio Is My Kryptonite", or the Loud Family's jolly celebration of computer-locked shut-ins, "Backward Century". Instead i am most awed by an open-wound song, Louise Post singing with wavery control to the boyfriend she'd caught in bed, not for his first time, with her best friend. She's started by recalling her hopes for the relationship, but has slid into a slower, more patient melody to list her hurts. "Now I'm on Zoloft, because you told me I was crazy/ and I won't jump, cuz now I know you'd never catch me", she sings, and as her next announcement begins, the song's rattling 6/8 drumbeat explodes and fractures into the pandemonium her voice still withholds. The only musical moment of the year to affect me as much is the song's gently weird unraveling into a whispered pledge to "touch the sky", sung with the heartening faith of a gal who hasn't noticed she's lying on wet cement with a bulldozer carving patterns into her back.
2. From Bubblegum To Sky, "Ask The Space Invader"
The use of bouncy melodies to convey depressive sentiments is a glorious bit of mischief, but also by now an old one. FBtS somehow pair a song of loss with an evocative, melancholy tune, and produce the whole schmeer into something so over-the-top shiny it _still_ registers as, well, bubblegum.
3. Regina Lund, "We Don't Need Another Hero"
Under Tina Turner, "...Hero" had served as a too-convenient example of why adult snobs who reject rock music as nothing but idiotic bluster are, alas, right more often than the average stopped watch. Lund reveals the much more surprising truth that song itself was never the problem. We await the reduction of "You Shook Me All Night Long" to its core of soulful longing next.
4. Dar Williams, "Highway Patrolmen"
I don't mean to imply, however, that sparse instrumentation is the key to great performance. Springsteen's original already was desolate, and Dar actually boosts it with mandolin, tasteful soft-rock gloss, and conventially pretty singing. And a moral of sincere but lost working-class morality is transformed in its empathetic embrace by a Northampton vegan pantheist who knows all along the flaw in "a man turns his back on his family, well he just ain't no good", but chooses to understand why it _ought_ to be enough.
5. Radiohead, "Optimistic"
-- Miranda Sex Garden, "Are You The One?"
The two bands i know who have done most to earn fame for leaping with every album beyond the impressive ambitions of the album prior, and one indeed is famous enough for both of them (though we'll see how Kathryn Blake likes that math instead of big royalty checks). My favorite of their songs this year are ones they could have done two albums ago; i hope they're not offended.
6. Bloodhound Gang, "the Bad Touch"
-- Eminem, "the Real Slim Shady"
Mercilessly catchy products of a world where values are replaced by irony. The Bloodhound Gang and Eminem care far more about their own cleverness than about sex or power, and that's the kind of void i want to have around.
7. Meat Puppets, "Hercules"
-- Marie Frank, "Symptom Of My Time"
If adolescents picked catchy song lyrics according to their _real_ concerns, these would've been the biggest worldwide hits in the rap-metal and AOR pop categories. Yes, i am saying that the adolescent male psyche, stripped to its core insecurities, still includes the notion "flesh-eating zombies are cooool".
8. Admiral Twin, "the Unlucky Ones"
Even in an era where lyrics should be self-deprecating, verses and choruses can aim to fill arenas of millions. Probably the esteem-deficient need it more anyway.
9. Logan Whitehurst, "Junior Science Club Theme"
Of course, just because other people look down on you doesn't mean you can't take their characterizations and the Salvation Army's beatbox, and stir them your into your own braggadacio.
10. Barcelona, "Replicant"
-- Madonna, "Impressive Instant"
Indeed, i can't imagine why thanking genetic engineers for letting you fall in love with your clone could be considered geeky. Madonna has preached self-love for years, and her computers are getting better and better at remaking her. Music from 1980's gleaming leftover future.
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