December 28, 2000–January 4, 2001
music|the year in media
The Top 21
The best of pop, rock and hip-hop as chosen by the City Paper music department.
A Guy Called Gerald
Essence
(Studio !K7)
Five years after the last trip to the dark technopolis of his acid-fried skull, the G, who made noir-house a genre, made 2000’s most energetic, elegaic record. How? By serving it up dusky jungle style, ripe with lady vocals from Deee-Lite’s Lady Miss Kier and Lamb’s Louise Rhodes. These women punctuate the break-beating, heartbreaking Essence with a silent film star’s screams. And Gerald makes like a soul-jazzy Nosferatu, creating a cinematic score that’s romantic and stuttering.
Bratmobile
Ladies, Women and Girls
(Kill Rock Stars)
The word "hate" appears in nearly every song on Bratmobile’s long-awaited return from hiatus, with most of it directed at fucking boys, fucking bands or fucking boys and their fucking bands. Allison Wolfe, who owns the sneeringest voice since Johnny Rotten, gets giddy on her own malice, and Molly Neuman and Erin Smith careen through the songs like they’re joyriding in a stolen car. The sound of everything you ever should have said, and didn’t.
Broadcast
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(Warp)
Is it possible to soar so far into the future while looking so deeply into the past? Broadcast says yes. Trish Keenan’s eerie, swirling vocals — mixed with layer upon layer of dreamy samples and entrancing drum beats — is immersed in the sugariness of ’60s pop. And to top it off, the album is rich with lyrical substance. You cannot merely nibble on the delicacy that Broadcast has concocted. The Noise Made By People must be devoured whole.
Common
Like Water for Chocolate
(MCA)
Maybe what was so laudable about Like Water was that it evoked such a full range of emotions. "Song for Assata" moistened more than a few tear ducts. "The Light" gave women a wide-toothed grin on a man’s love introspection. Thickly layered funk on "Time Travelin’" coerced us into shimmying. "Geto Heaven" hit an empathetic nerve. You get the point. When the album dropped in March it quickly became the album of springtime; its heavy rotation wouldn’t let up for months.
D’Angelo
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(Virgin)
All right, dude got buck-naked in a video. Still, this is one of the few wholly satisfying soul recordings in the Y2. Voodoo seamlessly blends hip-hop, R&B and some nasty mojo funk. These textures are back-boned by heavy drum kicks courtesy of ?uestlove, then layered by James Poyser’s smoldering keyboards and D’s rangy vocal register. From the hip-hop fused "Devil’s Pie," the smoky "Line" to the jazzy "Spanish Joint," D’Angelo aggressively avoided the sophomore slump with a throwback-fashioned yet progressive album.
—M.F Di Bella
Deltron 3030
Deltron 3030
(75 Ark)
While radio and TV airwaves transmitted bubblegum pop and mainstream thuggery, a few artists chose a more artistically challenging route. Deltron captures the maddening confusion of the modern technological age in a sardonic but auditory-stimulating way. Dan "The Automator" Nakamura set to music the discord of American progress coupled with the stream of consciousness notebook musings of Del Tha Funkee Homosapien. A groundbreaking time warp of sound montage that would make Carl Sagan a very proud man. Space Age Forever.
—M.F Di Bella
Eminem
The Marshall Mathers LP
(Interscope)
It’s been quoted so much I forget who said it: It’s a weird year when the best rapper’s white and the best golfer’s black. Forget color. Know first that Marshall Mathers’ delirious sense of fear is fueled by Dr. Dre’s creepy bombastic beats. From there, Eminem — perhaps the most important paranoid wit since Dylan — takes over, blurring the boundaries between good and bad, reality and surreality. It’s Eminem’s world, we and Tiger Woods are just putting through.
PJ Harvey
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(Island)
PJ Harvey’s latest starts out swinging, peaks in the middle and mellows to a close. At their best, Stories’ stories flesh out previous albums’ character sketches. Harvey’s bold enough to channel Patti Smith on "Good Fortune" and confident enough to let Thom Yorke take the lead on the best song, "This Mess We’re In." Whether bellowing in her deepest register or whipping out the falsetto, Harvey proves once again that she’s the only drama queen who matters.
Herrmann & Kleine
Kickboard Girl E.P.
(Morr Music/Darla)
Upon hearing this Berlin-based duo’s second offering, it’s difficult to believe this is the work of Thaddi Herrmann, former mastermind of Digital Hardcore Records’ Sonic Subjunkies. Herrmann and relative newcomer Christian Kleine construct the electronic soundtrack for those fleeting moments between sleep and waking. Angelic melodies seep in through pores, while muffled breakbeats get you swaying. It’s the sound of electronic perfection, but as the EP progresses, things unravel, if only slightly. Wires fray and chaos begins to seethe beneath the sheen.
Matthew Herbert
Letsallmakemistakes
(Tresor)
Better for home-listening than the dancefloor, UK minimal tech-house geekster Herbert demonstrates a gawky yet tactful interweaving of deep synthy house and playful minimal techno by artists like Isolee, DBX, Pantytec, Mr. Oizo, Plastikman and, best of all, six of his own irresistibly unique tracks (under a variety of aliases — DJ Herbert, Wishmountain and Radio Boy). His own stuff childishly fuses deep, soulful house and quirky, bugged-out experimental glitch-core — where he uses everyday sounds (like ripping paper or clanking silverware) rather than actual drum sounds.
Joan of Arc
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(Jade Tree)
Joan of Arc’s fourth long player is pretentious, completely listener unfriendly… and the most adventurous record to emerge from the narrowly defined emo genre. Fastidiously layered, The Gap is the sound of infinite studio tinkering two-stepping with spur-of-the-moment improvisation. Track breaks don’t match song breaks as stop-starting ruminations — played on clean channel guitar, askance strings and skittering drums — skip into one another. Tim Kinsellas’ abstract vocals contribute to the unearthly rhythm, and the overall effect is of being turned on one’s ear — the musical equivalent of vertigo.
Aimee Mann
Bachelor No. 2
(Superego)
Sure, Magnolia’s good, but Mann’s mettle can be found here. Sift through all the various indictments of the music industry’s stupid excesses, and you’ll find few as sharp, or as human, as hers. "But oh, those Polaroid babies/ taking chances with rabies/ happy to tear me to bits./ Well, I’m calling it quits." It’s a grown-up kind of desperation, married to silky melodies and arrangements that seem both effortless and impossibly detailed.
Modest Mouse
The Moon & Antarctica
(Epic)
There was no more fitting label for Modest Mouse’s major label coming-out party. On what could be the most epic album of the post-grunge era, leader Isaac Brock takes to preaching, crafting a sort of creation myth/post-apocalyptic nightmare. It’s a move that has galvanized the flock and is sure to win the band many converts. Brock laces this sweeping extended allegory with enough hellfire, brimstone and punchy, angular guitar lines to last you till the next ice age.
Outkast
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(Arista)
You’d be hard pressed to find another rap album this year that rocks as hard as Outkast’s Stankonia — and that includes all those Chocolate Starfishes swimming around in the nu-metal muck. If Andre 3000 and Big Boi shouting "Don’t everybody like the smell of gasoline! Burn muthafucka burn American dreams!" doesn’t make you wanna break stuff, I don’t know what will. But Stankonia doesn’t just rock, oh no, it funks and it bounces and it slinks and slides all over the place.
—Amy Phillips
Planet Asia
The Last Stand
(Landspeed Records)
It’s got to be something in the water. Bay area MCs rarely cease to be dime pieces and rhyme even better. But Left Coast production lacks the punch and artistry of the East, which is sometimes the case on The Last Stand. Regardless, the comprehensive lyrical strong-arming alone easily qualifies this as one of the year’s best. Newly signed to Interscope, let’s hope they don’t shelve Asia like they did Last Emp and make this his literal last stand.
Radiohead
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(Capitol)
You are not happy. You feel alienated in your little cubicle. You think that no one understands. Like your country, you have no direction. Your stocks, they plummet. Even your hair game has been off. But Thom and his mates feel the same numbing pain. It is techno-ennui. It is the Mope in the Machine. Yes, this Kid A is one miserable, robotic bastard and its digital voice sings to you.
Reflection Eternal
Train of Thought
(Rawkus)
One, two, three / In 2G it was Tek and Kweli / Who rocked twenty tracks righteously / Best alliance in hip-hop / Wyyy-ohhh.
Raising the bar for soundsmiths and wordsmiths alike in the underground’s cadre of street scholarship, DJ Hi-Tek and Talib Kweli radiate brilliantly like a helplessly incurable record junkie and silver-tongued bookworm-turned-MC who never compromise their craftsmanship in conveying the message.
Sigur Rós
Ágætis Byrjun
(Fat Cat)
It is cold in Sigur Rós native Iceland. Music grows slowly in the cold. Like an advancing glacier, the band’s sound is a surreal force of nature, pregnant with alien atmosphere. Music also grows melancholy in the cold. But mood and meaning are not conveyed in words on Ágætis Byrjun, for singer Jon Pór Birgisson’s haunting falsetto delivers Cocteau Twin-like nonsense over the mourn of ghostly guitars, doleful horns and hollow percussion. It’s all muffled magic.
Sleater-Kinney
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(Kill Rock Stars)
Sleater-Kinney’s evolution is like a Zen Magic 8-Ball. Every shake gives them a new way of looking at their approach to impossibly high-wired rock ’n’ roll. All Hands On the Bad One is personal with politics. "#1 Must-Have" and "Youth Decay" aren’t polemics per se; their pained understanding of tough life choices says what sermons can’t. And I swear Corin Tucker impersonates Cheap Trick’s Robin Zander during "The Professional."
Elliott Smith
Figure 8
(Dreamworks)
Though this album is at times grandiose, the power-pop thrills of "Junk Bond Trader" and "Stupidity Tries" outline Smith’s periodic temper tantrums almost as well as the bedroom sulks of yore. But it’s all right ma, Elliott’s not giving us the finger here. "In the Lost and Found" and "I Better Be Quiet Now" prove that he still has the best words and sounds for our quiet spaces, even if he’s not gate-crashing award ceremonies with them anymore.
VNV Nation
Empires
(Metropolis)
Seldom do you find music that compels your brain cells and your groove thing. VNV Nation’s Empires, possibly the most anticipated darkwave release of the year, delivered the infectious rhythms, sweeping orchestrations and blisteringly insightful lyrics of last year’s addictive Praise the Fallen, with icing: Ronan Harris discarded the monotonic distortion of yesterday’s vocals to sing for real this time around. The British duo also stole the show from labelmates Apoptygma Berzerk during their fall tour. Who says geeks shouldn’t have groupies?
—Helen H. Thompson
