2001

                A surprisingly weak year.  I’ve got virtually nothing from hip-hop this year: the Coup’s follow up to Steal This Album is solid but breaks no new groud & Ludacris has some great singles (Outkast-recalling in their southern bounce) on an album bogged down with filler, and that’s it for my hip-hop circa 2001.  So what I really have to talk about this year is virtually all on the rock side of things, and that’s just kinda OK.  What albums approach greatness are almost all to be found in the (primarily British) art-rock scene, and otherwise there’s a clutch of ok records, and a bunch of stuff I just can’t get that excited about.

                In the mainstream, the garage-revival continues, but is still smaller than I remembered.  The White Stripes finally take their place as the third (and best) of the big three of this mini-movement, with much more substance than either the Strokes or Hives.  “Fell In Love With A Girl” both out-Hives the Hives and is easily the best mainstream rock song of the year, but the Stripes also show a lot more sonic variety than their peers.  Beyond that, there’s not really a lot to talk about, other than a pair of Swedish bands that only vaguely fit the tag.  Soundtrack of Our Lives were apparently huge in Europe, but failed to break in the States with their more 70s glam/Kinks sound, while the (International) Noise Conspiracy continue to split the difference between the Hives and Refused; more structurally adventurous than the former but less aggressive than the latter.  Pretty fun, but I can’t say I like them better than either the Hives or Refused.  Not a lot for me this year in punk-rock either, except that the Dropkick Murphys finally reach the Celtic-punk sound that’ll come to define them, basically sounding like a more punk-heavy take on the Pogues, but with a more explicitly working-class lyrical focus that splits the difference between the old UK Oi! bands and Bruce Springsteen.

                A few of the old US alt bands are still throwing singles into the mainstream.  Stone Temple Pilots end their run with another of their solid glam-rockers, while Weezer make a rather unexpected and ultimately underwhelming return.  90s Weezer sounded like lighthearted peers of the immediate post-grunge alt bands, but on their return, Weezer sound a lot more like the late-90s pop-punk of the likes of Blink-182.  It’s fun, for the most part, but a lot more empty-headed than their earlier stuff, and perhaps a touch cynically calibrated for radio play.

                THE alt-rock band of the late 80s/early 90s is also back this year, although this is the last year from which I own an R.E.M. album.  Reveal keeps the lounge/Pet Sounds sonic template of Up, though I think it’s a bit better, and they sound a bit more comfortable with their new sound.  Still, in place of Up’s lone reminder of their psych-glam period, “Lotus,” we get “Imitation of Life,” a lone reminder of their mid-80s glory days.  “Imitation” keeps the synth-heavy sonics of the rest of the album, but stands out chiefly as a reminder of how they used to be able to write classic melodies; it can’t help but make the rest of the album pale in comparision.  Also, while neither US-based nor mainstream, but the Manic Street Preachers also get on the Beach Boys homage bandwagon this year.

                Things are a bit better in the UK overall, though, where most of the interesting rock records are from (and generally all from the neo-prog stuff that’s been the best of rock for a while now).  The band making the biggest waves is without a doubt Radiohead, who follow up their radical shift on Kid A with a flood of material.  Amnesiac, a second album carved out of the same sessions (like Elvis used to do!) is to my ears a bit better: it’s clear they took the songs in the new style that were most completed and put them on Kid A, leaving Amnesiac to contain a) the songs that are a bit more grounded in rock sounds and b) a clutch of song fragments.  This has the effect of making Amnesiac play a bit more like Blur’s 13, another album that kept an ever-so-slight toehold in rock sounds, and I think makes for a richer listening experience by offering an actually more new sound (since Kid A was Radiohead-going-electronic (and sounding basically like a pretty-good electronica band), and Amnesiac sounds more like the band actually fusing what they used to do with their new sounds).  Not content with that, Radiohead also put out a live mini-album (or EP or whatever) of their new-style songs live, showing that they’re not just studio-rats now (and also recasting them in slightly more muscular/less ambient arrangements).  It’s the rare worthwhile live album, showing how the band can play this stuff live.

                Radiohead, however, are far from the only band working in this abstracted terrain, thought the others, by and large, are working with more organic sounds rather than the cold electronics of Radiohead.  The Beta Band, for instance, probably betters Radiohead this year with their second full-length.  All of the songs on Hot Shots II are shorter than all but one song on their first album (and under 4:41), and working in such confined spaces really brings out the band’s strengths.  There’s no curtailing of the experimentation, but it’s kept concise and they’re not able to wander off into so many dead ends.  Joe Strummer, like the Beta Band, mixes a sonic stew that includes more organic elements than Radiohead, and unlike the Beta Band (but unsurprisingly) includes a lot more international elements.  This is a big step up from his last album; though similar sonically, it all seems a bit more well-blended.  A worthy, if mellow, follow-up from where Strummer was at the end of the Clash.

                More conventionally, a couple of the Brit-pop bands also do well this year.  Pulp end their run, still mixing trip-hop elements, although they seem to have added roots-rock and swapped out some of the glam: their album closer actually recalls Phish.  They also sound considerably happier than they have in the past, leaving them in a good place to close out their run.  The Super Furry Animals, meanwhile, continue to build on Guerilla’s sonic template, not really adding sonic elements but getting more ambitious in moving into song-suite constructions.  Prog-like, a bit, but really more like the pop-prog suites of Wings-era Paul McCartney. 

                Speaking of prog, Damon Albarn returns with an honest-to-goodness concept album, the debut of his Gorillaz project.  In the context of Brit-pop, this is a dramatic departure, but understood as another in a recent surge of hip-hop concept albums, it makes a lot of sense.  Despite the relative lack of rapping, this is as much a hip-hop album as anything.  Really, what this sounds like is a Deltron sequel that’s a bit heavier on the rock/pop elements (as well as a healthy dose of dub).  Not as good as Deltron, maybe, but one of the better of the rock-hip-hop fusion records to emerge in the post-Odelay soundscape, and certainly the best effort of a UK act to engage with hip-hop to date.  I suppose it’s not too different conceptually from what BAD were up to in the 80s, and this does create some trepidation on my part that Gorillaz will age as badly as BAD did.  Or New Order, for that matter, who return after a long time with their first album since 1993.  And it’s definitely quite a bit better than that sorry record, though as with Republic, New Order sound not unlike they’re trying to tap into more contemporary sounds.  So both the Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan and Primal Scream’s Billy Gillespie show up on tracks that definitely recall the contemporary sounds of their respective bands.  Still, since both the Pumpkins (esp. in their electronica mode) and Primal Scream borrowed a lot from New Order, this works pretty well overall, taking New Order in a generally more rock direction than their last records (which granted, were about a decade ago).

                You could argue that the beat-heavy work of Gorillaz and New Order lay the groundwork for the incipient dance-punk movement, and you’d be on safe ground with New Order.  I think it’s a bit of a stretch for Gorillaz, though, whose beats are more hip-hop-based than the more four-on-the-floor dance beats the dance-punks will favor (and their influences anyway run more toward the late-70s early-80s Gang of Four/New Order school).  Regardless, you do start to see a clutch of these post-punk-revival groups starting to surface this year, including Ladytron, Radio 4, and !!!.  That these bands are starting to turn toward more dance-heavy sounds isn’t too surprising, given that the dance scene is considerably more interesting than the mainstream rock world.  Certainly Basement Jaxx are more innovative than anything in, say, garage-revival.  And (as I’ll discuss below), Daft Punk probably put out the best album of the year with Discovery, condensing (Beta Band-style) their lengthy ideas into pop-song structures and lengths.  In retrospect, this record will be a major influence on both indie rock (through the likes of LCD Soundsystem) and hip-hop (through Kanye and the increasingly Euro-dance focused hip-hop world), and it deserves its acclaim, being both accessible and fantastically innovative.  It’s not too much of a stretch to call it dance-prog, keeping the sonic exploration & concept records of, say, Floyd, but with a heavy ever-present beat.

                Within indie-rock more generally, there are a couple of records by veterans and a couple by artists that’ll be major figures in the decade ahead.  Built to Spill basically continue down the same path as their previous album, compressing their sprawling epics into more concise packages; it’s good but not quite as great as earlier stuff.  Guided By Voices, meanwhile, change their sound a bit more, not really altering their basic songwriting, but moving away from the lo-fi quantity-over-quality approach to recording of their 90s stuff.  So this gets the nod from me, as I’ve previously made my position known on the vices of lo-fi.  Of course, I should probably note too that my GvB collection is far from complete (I have the widely-proclaimed classics and not much else), so this shift may have been gradually occurring for years…

                Anyway, there’s also the first appearance in my collection of two bands that’ll be among the bigger names in indie rock for the next few years: Death Cab for Cutie and the Shins.  In addition to their parallel development, both bands offer twee vocalists singing pop melodies, making them essentially an American interpretation of the UK indie-pop sound of Belle & Sebastian and the like.  The difference, I suppose, is that the UK twee-poppers were aggressively so, making their music as much a reaction to the post-Oasis mainstream in the UK as anything else.  The US version isn’t reacting to anything, so are much more willing to let hints of big guitar and rock into their sound.  Oddly, I think I prefer the UK version, maybe just because I’d wish esp. Death Cab would stop being so precious.  The Shins bother me less, largely because they sound like a very good pop band, but Death Cab sound like they want to be Built to Spill or Modest Mouse or the like, but are holding themselves back in order to deliberately up the twee.  Or maybe I just find Ben Gibbard unforgivably whiney as a vocalist (and their mix foregrounds the vocals, so I can’t even ignore the vocalist and focus on the band, like I do with the Faces).  The Shins, though, while a bit too precious, are damn good at writing folk-pop songs, so I don’t mind at all.        

                  Shifting to roots-rock, there’s some alt-country and post-alt-country.  The Old 97s prove to be the alt-country band most willing to stick close to the core sound; it’s not that they don’t change their sound, but more that they continue to work within the alt-country genre.  This year their songcraft continues to tighten, producing stuff that both can get a little bit of radioplay and stays true to alt-country.  Ex-Whiskeytowner/ex-alt-countryman Ryan Adams, meanwhile, like Soundtrack of Our Lives is devoting himself to trying to capture the breadth of 70s roots-rock on a single album.  This makes for a much more diverse album than Heartbreaker’s narrower singer-songwriter template, but at times Adams’ songcraft sounds more like pastiche than anything else.  Sometimes, like on “Touch, Feel, and Lose,” I swear I’ve heard every line in that song already in different songs.  Also, if he’s going to be so humorless about the whole Ryan/Bryan Adams thing, he probably should try a little less to sound like Canada’s favorite heartland rocker, at least on the songs he releases as singles (i.e. “New York, New York).

                This is a year in roots-rock where the oldsters seem to do a better job than the young’uns.  Buddy Guy proves his ability to play in that raw hill-country blues style, at times approximating (through a foregrounded throbbing bassline) the slightly electronic/dance experiments of R.L. Burnside.  Even better, though, is Bob Dyan, whose late-career renaissance continues in a much different mode than Time Out OF Mind.  While that one was dark & moody, Love & Theft is considerably more colorful, with a wide but largely pre-1966 sonic template, and some of the worse jokes ever on a Dylan record  (namely: “I'm stark naked but I don't care/I'm going off into the woods I'm hunting bear”).  Both Dylan and Guy contrast well with Merle Haggard, who’s similarly backward-looking on his all-covers record; it’s good but nothing we haven’t heard before, in contrast to Dylan and Guy’s more adventurous sounds.

                Finally, 2001 is a year with a handful of records I want to mention that don’t really fit in anywhere else.  Tenacious D’s debut was probably one of the records from this year that I listened to the most at the time, and it is both quite funny (though you can only re-listen to jokes so many times) and past the jokes, a pretty effective recreation of post-Zeppelin hard rock played primarily on acoustic instruments.  Candiria is a band where I was given the record by a friend, and never really listened to it until now; they fit in well with the post-hardcore bands.  Though it’s more on the metal side of things, it shares with the likes of Refused and the (International) Noise Conspiracy a willingness to radically shift tones from metal to hip-hop to jazz and the like.  So also fits as hard prog.  Finally, Bela Fleck has moved out of the jam band sound and into straight classical music (much like the considerably older likes of McCartney and Billy Joel).

Song of the Year:  Two picks, on radically opposite sides of the technological spectrum.  Bob Dylan’s “High Water (For Charley Patton)” is a fantastic piece of apocalyptic bluegrass that can stand alongside the likes of “Hard Rain” lyrically and musically sounds like Dylan heard the new-grass of the O Brother soundtrack (esp. “Man of Constant Sorrow”) and decided to take the kids to school.  On the other side of the spectrum, Daft Punk’s ”Harder Better Faster Stronger” is probably their finest moment and certainly one of the finest electronica/house singles ever released, being ridiculously catchy and seeming to have a point (unlike a lot of house).  Poor Kanye West: I can’t help but hate his HFBS-sampling “Stronger” because every time it comes on the radio, I hope it’s Daft Punk, and he should really know better than to try to improve on perfection.

Album of the Year:  Daft Punk – Discovery.  Most of the best albums of 2001 were conceptual, but this one actually pulls off what Gorillaz attempted but failed: being both state-of-the-art musically and a genuine multimedia experience with the accompanying anime film.  Also undoubtedly Daft Punk’s triumph, packing the beats and inventiveness that sprawled across two LPs last time into a tight, innovative, and catchy little beast.

Artist Most Benefiting from Reevaluation:  Shakira, who I’m upgrading from guilty pleasure to artist straight-up enjoy.  She’s by far the best of the Latin fad that ran up the pop charts at this time, including Santana’s “Smooth”-driven sales-seeker.  Forgetting that you heard these songs alongside a host of vapid ex-Mousketeers, they actually rock fairly credibly (and don’t feel particulary processed or like the product of a songwriting robot).  Also, the way Shakira obviously has the pronunciation of someone who speaks English as a second language is kind of endearing. 

Artist Most Diminished in Reevaluation:  Ludacris.  The singles are what I remember from this album, and the singles (and some of the album tracks) are indeed fantastic (and I dig that he builds a song around the Dies Irae from Mozart’s requiem), but there’s a lot of pretty dire filler here that I guess I block out or skip when I listen. 

Album List

Basement Jaxx - Rooty

Béla Fleck - Perpetual Motion

Belle & Sebastian - The BBC Sessions

Bob Dylan - Love & Theft

Bruce Springsteen - Now That's What I Call Christmas

Buddy Guy - Sweet Tea

Built To Spill - Ancient Melodies Of The Future

Candiria - 300 Percent Density

Daft Punk - Discovery

Daft Punk - Musique Vol 1

Death Cab For Cutie - The Photo Album

Dinosaur Jr. - Ear-Bleeding Country: Best Of Dinosaur Jr

Dropkick Murphys - Sing Loud, Sing Proud!

Dropkick Murphys - The Singles Collection, Vol. 2

Elliott Smith - Misc.

Gorillaz - Gorillaz

Guided By Voices - Isolation Drills

Iron Maiden - Misc.

Joe Strummer - Global A Go-Go

Johnny Cash - Timeless: Hank Williams Tribute

King Crimson - Live 1994-2003

Ludacris - Word Of Mouf

Manic Street Preachers - Forever Delayed

Merle Haggard - Roots Volume 1

Michael Jackson - The Essential Michael Jackson

New Order - Get Ready

New Order - Retro

Old 97's - Hit By A Train: The Best Of Old 97's

Ozzy Osbourne - Misc.

Pearl Jam - Christmas Singles

Pulp - We Love Life

R.E.M. - Reveal

Radiohead - Amnesiac

Radiohead - I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings

Radiohead - Misc.

Radiohead - Pyramid Song EP

Rancid - Misc.

Ryan Adams - Gold

Shakira - Laundry Service

Stereolab - Serene Velocity - A Stereolab Anthology

Stone Temple Pilots - Thank You

Super Furry Animals - Rings Around The World

Super Furry Animals - Super Furry Animals Songbook

Tenacious D - Tenacious D

The (International) Noise Conspiracy - A New Morning, Changing Weather

The Beta Band - Hot Shots II

The Coup - Party Music

The Cranberries - The Best Of The Cranberries 20th Century Masters The Millennium Collection

The Fall - 50,000 Fall Fans Can't Be Wrong: 39 Golden Greats

The Mountain Goats - Misc.

The Shins - Oh, Inverted World

The Soundtrack Of Our Lives - Behind The Music

The Strokes - Hard To Explain/New York City Cops

The White Stripes - White Blood Cells

U2 - The Best Of 1990-2000

V/A - MUSICMATCH/Astralwerks Sampler

V/A - Snatch

Weezer - Weezer (Green Album)