Here's the final form of the list. I decided not to change any of the
top 20 cause I like it just the way it is but I added intro and 3 bonus
tracks. Peace+etc.
--
...extensive liner notes and make-believe alien languages...
Rev. Jack Godsey.
http://members.tripod.com/~spill/index.html
Spiritual counsel and webmaster for Pegasi 51.
http://members.tripod.com/pegasi51/index.html
This isn't a list of the "best" albums of the decade; this is a list of the albums
from the past ten years that
I have heard and that I like the most - that's all. I refuse to say that Godspeed You
Black Emperor!
are "better" than the Spice Girls. My taste is my own. There is music that I like
and music that I don't
- that's all anyone can say. Someone who tries to tell you that they know which music
is "good" and
which is "bad" is an idiot.
This isn't a list of the "most important" albums of the decade; that's why you won't
see, for example,
_Loveless_ or _Spiderland_ here, much as I like them. I think music is essentially
progressive and
that's why this list may seem slanted toward the latter half of the 90s.
This list may seem narrow in scope. I made no attempt to be self-conciously eclectic.
I may listen to
an absurd range of music, but that doesn't mean I like all of it equally. Some genres
resonate more with
me than others.
23.Bardo Pond - Set and Setting
Putting the rock back in indie rock with monolithic, slow-motion, over-saturated riffs
that owe as much
to blues as to psychedelia, the Pond have given us some very haunting, pot-fueled,
organic music.
Every song they've ever done sounds like a jam session that went horribly right; there
are almost never
any such silly trappings as "verse" or "chorus". This is the album where they finally
let their blues
influence come out fully - I'd even make the assertion that the 10-minute opener
"Walking Stick Man"
IS a blues song, complete with gorgeously off-kilter harmonica, and soulful wailing by
singer Isobel.
22.Sun City Girls - Dante's Disneyland Inferno
What can I say about Kali-worshipping rednecks who once lived in India as street
musicians? I think
they're from Texas. If they aren't, they sure sound like it. Over two CDs are spread
cannibalistic
campfire singalongs, spoken-word ramblings about old horror flicks and college radio,
carnival (of
souls) music, demented howlings, and more. It's fun.
21.Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - Murder Ballads
Almost no artist has aged as well as Nick Cave. I'd have a hard time picking more
than a handful of
his songs that I think are anything less than great. This is the album where he
almost went too far, and
that makes it wonderful. "Stagger Lee" is like some kind of
folk-song-turned-gangsta-rap, and the 15-
minute "O'Malley's Bar" is a modern epic poem.
20.Skinny Puppy - Last Rights
Pretty much destroys any watered-down fourth-wave industrial around today (and I don't
just mean
the shit on MTV, yes I'm talking to you in the dog collar and riveted leather pants).
Every time I listen
to it is like injecting a reminder of how the genre finally died; kicking and
screaming.
19.Windy&Carl - Depths
All the water imagery isn't just a half-assed attempt to tie the album together; this
thing plays like an
ocean as seen from a hundred miles high - so far up that all the details of the
swarming waves and
endless motion are blended together. You know there's a lot of shit going on if you
look hard enough.
18.Neutral Milk Hotel - In the Aeroplane Over the Sea
Jeff Magnum has managed to make two incredible albums using about ten total chords.
He's a folk
singer, a very art-damaged, poetic folk singer. When they kick it up a notch, though,
as on "Holland,
1945" or "Ghost", they rock harder than anything I've heard on *ahem* "Extreme Radio".
17.Flying Saucer Attack - New Lands
The closest thing FSA has made to a dance record. Sounding almost machinelike in its
texturing of
ominous, pulsing rhythms which loop endlessly with some of the most nebulous white
noise possible,
this is perhaps Saucer pilot Pearce's reaction to all the electronic music coming out
of his country.
It's still pretty good for staring at the ends of yr shoes to, of course.
16.Boredoms - Super AR
This is just some of the most intense, frantic rock music I've ever heard. Each song
plays like an entire
MC5 concert fast-forwarded. Miles ahead of any of their previous albums.
15.Legendary Pink Dots - Crushed Velvet Apocalypse
Usually dismissed as "goth" (even less hip than "industrial"), the Pink Dots are about
as goth as
goddamn Pink Floyd. When they started using less keyboards and decided to just write
damn good
songs in the early 90s they instantly changed from an interesting-yet-dated band to a
menacing
psychedelic hallucination.
14.Rex - Rex
Debut from the country version of Slint. Much more sparse and haunting than their
later albums, though
only slightly better (and nothing could beat the musicless duet between the singer and
his mother that
closes their second record).
13.Pavement - Crooked Rain Crooked Rain
They made a rock opera, they wanted to show us suburban America circa 1993. And it
succeeded
perfectly, which is why you probably either love or hate this one.
12.Midnight Oil - Blue Sky Mining
And over in Australia, they wanted to show us cold mornings looking at abandoned steel
mills. There's
something earnestly gloomy about this album; it's probably the only really "great" one
Midnight Oil has
made. It's as if they did _OK Computer_ six years earlier, and better.
11.John Frusciante - Niandra LaDes and Usually Just a T-Shirt
Yes, that John Frusciante. Rest assured (or be warned) this sounds absolutely nothing
like the Red Hot
Chili Peppers. Consists entirely of vocals and layered acoustic guitar tracks
recorded and produced in
his bedroom. I could tell you to think of Daniel Johnston channeling Ween, but that
wouldn't be half as
good as this.
10.Ghost - Lama Rabi Rabi
When, after an uneventful 9-minute intro consisting of vague noises and voices, there
instantly comes
what sounds like a frantic pygmie chant and groovy krautrock-ish bassline with roaring
feedback that
continues for 8 minutes, you know you bought the right album.
9.Negativland - Free
There's not much to say about this. If you know Negativland, you know them, and if
you don't, it
would take me too long to explain. I listen to their albums because they flip the
channels for me.
8.Bedhead - Beheaded
Songwriting so precisely good it's disturbing. They progressed from being a mopey
fuzzed-out
Velvets-inspired band on the first album to being mopey and not fuzzed-out when they
broke up after
the third, and the second one catches the best sounds from both. It's pretty much all
about staying in
bed.
7.Tricky - Pre-Millennium Tension
Tricky is a prophet and a madman. If you've seen him live, especially in a small
club, you know this.
This album is like Prince's evil twin.
6.Mogwai - Come On Die Young
>From their first album to this one, Mogwai discarded almost all their influences.
>Then they got new
ones. Sure, in many ways this album isn't terribly "inventive"... at times it sounds
like several other
bands on this list. But it's done well, and that's all that matters.
5.Yo La Tengo - I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One
The slacker makeout album of the late 90s. Another one all my recent girlfriends have
owned.
4.Swans - Soundtracks for the Blind
140 minutes and not a single bad song. M. Gira has always been perfectly dramatic,
and he ended the
Swans in the best way possible. The re-occurring theme of taped conversations with
random people
(especially with Gira's father and Jarboe's mother on "How They Suffer") is haunting
to say the least;
the best use of the gimmick is probably "I Was a Prisoner in Your Skull" (which has
the first words
spoken on the album), somehow managing to be comic, ominous, and sad at the same time.
3.Spiritualized - Pure Phase
J. Spaceman performs the admirable feat of making heroin and love sound good.
2.Labradford - Mi Media Naranja
Labradford sound like nothing else. There's a lot of classical playing going on...
there are strings and
sometimes piano... and then there's a tremolo guitar and a barely-audible loop of
little kids singing
"happy birthday"... and lyrics about candles and seances... and a high-pitched ping
noise that seems to
dance around the room and then disappear... and precise bass and guitar lines repeated
over and over.
It's all very cinematic and swampy.
1.Godspeed You Black Emperor! - F# A# infinity
GYBE! have something like three guitar players, two bass players, two drummers, a
violin player, a
cello player, and I think another couple violin players. Anyway, they're a rock
orchestra. The album
has only three tracks, each one being a suite of several songs that sort of flow
together. They start slow
and build and build until it's the loudest music you've ever heard. The opening
monologue alone is
worth buying it for.
