February 11, 2002
Top Ten Albums From the Year 2001:
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1. The
Court And Spark: Bless You. An album that came out of leftfield,
considering that the band's first release was fairly standard,
Whiskeytown-inspired alt-country. Bless You is a masterpiece
of songwriting, playing, and production. Easily ranks with the
best of American Music Club.
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3. Hood:
Cold House. Having done the lo-fi indie pop thing, the swirly
shoegaze thing, and the slowcore mopey thing, it was time for
Leed's Hood to tackle the electronic thing. Progressing from
last year's Home Is Where It Hurts EP, Hood meld programmed
drums with guitars and invite members of Oakland's Anticon crew
to season the songs with surrealistic raps about fish and thrift
store hats. One of the most original indie albums ever, surprising
in its sure-footedness, absolutely unexpected and brilliant
from beginning to end.
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4. Bjork:
Vespertine. A gorgeous, crystalline ice sculpture of an album.
Chiming music boxes and the best songs she's recorded so far.
"Pagan Poetry" is a terrifying portrait of co-dependance
and damage and makes the album excell all on its own. Bjork is
at the same place in her artistic development that Bowie was when
he made Low, and her next step is anyone's guess. |
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5. Mark
Eitzel: The Invisible Man. One of the longest gestations
for an album in recent memory, when it finally arrived after
three years of delay, it baffled some of the faithful with its
full embrace of electronics and the ProTools aesthetic. Close
listening reveals this to be Eitzel's most personal and heartfelt
solo album with his best material since Mercury.
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6. Wilco:
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. Not officially released this year, though
it may as well have been, the real mystery is how the label thought
an album filled with great pop material like "War on War",
"Pot Kettle Black", and "Heavy Metal Drummer"
sounded weirder than the cabaret-art-freakout Summerteeth.
The real triumphs here are the slow songs, though, such as the
aching "Reservations" and the disturbingly precognative
"Ashes of American Flags". |
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7. Charles
Atlas : Felt Cover. The perfect mix of the electronic elements
of the first CA album and the drifting ambience of their second.
Startling in its attention to the most delicate and nuanced
sounds, Felt Cover maps the mysterious territory between
silence and the sublime.
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8. Jim
O'Rourke : Insignificance. Owing a debt to
(smog) on this one, O'Rourke's talents as a lyricist really shine
with acidic and bitter stories of love, abandonment, and disgust,
set to deceptively poppy tunes. |
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9. Tarentel
: The Order of Things. One hour of understated, trembling
sonic beauty that never overextends its reach; six intertwined
pieces–one a Ricki Lee Jones cover–evoking wind, damp,
Japanese space stations, closed and humidified sick rooms, haunted
libraries, dimpled lake surfaces stressed under storm.
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10. Piano
Magic: Son De Mar. Partially recycled from A Trick of the
Sea, this 40 minute instrumental piece, commissoned as a sountrack,
departs from the band's recent song-based direction, for the better.
Excellent contributions by and James Topham on viola and Charles
Atlas' Charles Wyatt on guitar.
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Other recommendations: the shins: oh, inverted world!; papa m: whatever,
mortal; the angels of light: how i loved you; mogwai: my father, my
king; stereolab: sound dust. Labels: 2001, reviews, top ten
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"regret everything and always live in the past"
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