71. Idlewild – Roseabaility
Forget Dismemberment Plan. This is my pick for most underappreciated band of the decade. Easily. Let me tell you a little story about 14-year-old Drew getting into Idlewild.
I read about their brilliant 2000 album 100 Broken Windows in Spin. Where from a good amount of my middle-teen tastes sprung forth. You know, back before non-music fans bought the franchise and put Fall Out Boy on the cover. Anyway, I digress (Spin blows). I went to the local record store, which, yes, we still have one of those, and yes, I still call it that, and picked up the album on import. This was before you could find the really good obscure shit online. If it was Spice Girls or heaping amounts of virus-laden porn, you weren't finding this shit on Limewire.
I brought it over to the house of my Other Nerdy About Music friend, and we went down to the basement and threw it on a crappy '90s silver boombox. Not one of the cool detachable speaker ones, mind you. The shit with the speaker built in. What passes for a clock/radio now. And we listened to what up until that point in my life was one of the greatest albums I had ever discovered. It was totally different. Like some kids from across the pond were working on music on an isolated island, foreign from evolution and outside tampering and natural selection - the shit was confined. Turns out that island was Scotland.
And it turns out Idlewild sounded like hundreds of other bands I love. They fit perfectly in the lineage of spittle-and-rage + melody + emotion music that had been progressing since the late '70s. The Buzzcocks to Husker Du to harder R.E.M. to Nirvana to Idlewild. It's all the same shit. Brilliant, lovely shit.
So that brings us to "Roseability", a song which my puny 14-year-old brain envisioned becoming the biggest song in the world. This band was going to be huge, and I was there on the ground floor. I was going to be able to hold this over those other oblivious fucks for years, well through college. But then nothing happened. No one in the US gave a shit. And Idlewild lightened up and eventually started making mediocre pop-rock that now makes it, well, a little embarassing to back them up so much.
But this song means the world to me. Listen to when the noise kicks in at :34. That's prime Nirvana. It's amping up the volume, yes, but it's also pushing the emotion into a new fuckin stratosphere. And those little angelic back up vocals when Rowdy Roddy sings about Gertrude Stein. It's vitriol and muscle and some sadness and a beautiful ear for melody. And nothing pulls at my heart strings and reminds me of a different time in my life than when he shreds the word "Dissatisfied" at :57. That was the most real, endearing thing I had discovered in my life. And it kind of killed me that no one else cared.
72. Dismemberment Plan – Time Bomb
Color me impressed. Some of you fucks got it. The D-Plan are easily one of the most underrated bands of the first part of the '00s. Their very, very late 1999 album Emergency and I is one of the best albums of that decade. Shit, it would be one of the best albums of any decade. Release it four months later and we would be discussing it as one of the ten best of the aughts. And then Travis Morrison and the Wailers follow that up with 2001's Change, another ballsy and purely original album that features "Time Bomb," the statement song from a band that never had any trouble taking a stand with their music. Not, like, politically or anything. But emotionally, this band never had issue with laying it's shit on the line for everyone to hear and expressing themselves without fear of fans or critics or other bands or their own band members.
It's hard to describe Dismemberment Plan's sound. That's because it's like Groundhog Day, the inspiration for the band's name. It's familiar and populist and clean for the most part. But there is just something a little off about it, some tweaks here and there that make the entire thing wholly unique and daring. It's a brilliant twist on a traditional archetype. Groundhog Day is a Bill Murray sarcasticomedy vehicle, succinct, well-written, and polished. But what makes the movie is the quirks, be it the movies idea or heart or oddball characters ("Ned?! Ned RYERSON?!") there is just more to it. The music of the Dismemeberment Plan is just like the clean and perfectly-executed indie-punk of the turn of the millenium, except for it's dirty fish-out-of-water quirks. The lightning-paced and funked-up as all hell synco-drumming, the aching and lifting vocals that go wayyyyy out to left field, stretching with an elasticity unlike any current singer, the electronic twitches unheard of in their genre. Big picture - this shit is pure power-pop candy. Closer look - the dings and nicks make it brilliant.
Also, the lyrics. Listen to the pull of Travis Morrison's vocals on lines like "I/I am a TRIP wire." This shit is like great theater, the lines can only be convincing if spouted with conviction, and that's what Morrison does best. And again, the drumming. Just listen to it. The pops, the little hi-hat ticks here and there in unexpected palces. This is the sound of polished mayhem, gritty antiques in an Ikea box. Don't let the packaging fool you. The Dismemberment Plan were one of the most uniquely talented acts of the decade.
73. Wilco – Hummingbird
"Remember to remember me/Standing still in your past/floating past like a hummingbird"? "His goal in life was to be an echo"? Jeff Tweedy is the fucking Poet Laureate of the underground. Seriously, I don't think anyone in music today is writing words like this man, meaningful and powerful and lyrical and thought-provoking, cryptic but not obtuse, intelligent but not indulgent, witty but not facetious. An integral reason for Wilco being considered a noteworthy act outside of alternative music, ever pressing against the walls of mainstream culture.
And on "Hummingbird" from 2004's A Ghost is Born, Tweedy and co. go for their most naturally classic pop song to date, doing a dead-on Fab Four impersonation replete with chugging outro and McCartney voice strains. Seriously, this is Lennon/Macca for a new generation, except it's coming from one man and the band is tighter. For proof positive, listen to Tweedy's elastic voice streeeetttttttch up and then down for the hesitant, playful notes at 1:55. Listen to "Count them." That is Paul McCartney reborn. Or, well, that can't be. I forget that the Beatles are actually dying in coolness order. Ringo will live to be 117.
At 2:35, the band shakes off the song's slow-rolling rust and stomps through the most blatantly obvious 30-second ELO rip-off of all time. But guess what? This song is better than anything Jeff Lynne ever wrote. And that's an important distinction that maybe Wilco alone shares among their contemporary indie rock peers. They show their influences with pride and reverence, but often they improve on their own history. I'm not saying they're better than the Beatles. But they do more with this Beatle-esque ditty than any other band in the world could. They make something fresh and beautiful and moving from the ashes of a sound that is burned to the ground every day by less deserving bands. Also, hold on to your butts (Samuel L. voice). We aren't through with the boys from Chi-town just yet.
74. D’Angelo – Untitled (How Does it Feel?)
WARNING. Do NOT listen to this song if young children, easily influenced older children, nosey pets or envy-inclined lovers are anywhere in the near vacinity. Check for them. All set? Ok, then get up and close the door, lock it, dim the lights down real low. Maybe light an aromatic candle or something. And get ready to have yourself a time.
"Untitled (How Does it Feel?)" from D'Angelo's 2000 neo-soul masterpiece Voodoo is, by a wide-margin, the sexiest song on this list, the sexiest song of the decade, shit, one of the sexiest song's of all time. This hangs right up there with it's obvious influences (Prince, Marvin Gaye) as a landmark R&B track, a classic slice of soul whose purpose is solely to influence the making of babies. I'm serious, stop oogling the lower abs and listen to the lyrics. You can't really get more straightforward than "Take off your clothes/Baby."
This song is more than an aural aphrodisiac, though. Sure, it influences the nasty like none other. But it is also the culmination of generations of raw, unadulterated talent, an art form maturing, dying out, and being reborn by a preacher's son from the south with a killer set of pipes, a strong sense of musical history, and V-shaped muscles by his crotch that make Michael Phelps look like Big Bird. The song was written as a tribute to Prince, and certainly wears that influence on it's-- well, I guess it can't wear the influence anywhere, it's thrown on the floor in the pile of hastily disrobed garments. But you can hear the 1983, Dirty Mind Prince. You can hear the late-'70s Barry White and early-'70s Marvin Gaye. You can hear the most soulful voices of black America coming together in the raucous, climactic (in every way) chorus of D'Angelo's screaming in anticipation. Not to mention the Jimi Hendrix guitar that burbles beneath the lazy ?uestlove snare hits and slinking bass.
It's brilliant and beautiful and fully steeped in the greatest soul songwriters and performers of the past. And "Untitled (How Does it Feel?)" is unashamed to be the most brazenly, soulfully sexual song of the '00s.
Note: Yes, it DOES actually end like that. And go to youtube and watch the music video, I can't embed it. Thanks, EMI.
75. Radiohead – Everything in its Right Place
I know the rules. Listen, I wrote the goddamn rules. So I know them. But I told you I was going to make exceptions for albums that are the most important of the decade that have multiple songs that merit inclusion on their own. Well, there you go. This one counts.
It’s the opener to the best album of the ‘00s. It was a pretty revolutionary way to start a song set when it came out on Kid A in 2000. The warm keyboard tones were a total about face for the guitar-driven lonely nerd rock of the first half of their career, and were a daring way to raise the curtain on this particular grouping of tracks. There are more, I don’t know, welcoming sounds on this record. But upon many, many listens, it’s the only correct way to kick off the album. The meaty, menacing tones envelop the listener in sound quickly, a single-instrument surround sound that pulls one in to an engulfing musical experience.
With a child-like twisting-in-the-wind vocal effect, Thom Yorke careens about sucking on lemons. Which everyone in the U.S. ascertained was some brilliant allusion to alienation. Turns out in the UK that just means waking up with a bitter disposition. Go figure. The baby Yorke's continue to burble and whine underneath the now-soaring lead vocals as disintegrating keybroads drip up into the mix, the sounds slurring and leaving aural trails behind like the paint scenes in "What Dreams May Come." This is the sound of music leaving behind indelible streaks.
The cacophony builds and then receds, echoing out over the same bursting keyboard tones that ushered it in. And with 4 minutes down, we're all prepped for what is probably the single-greatest listening experience of the '00s.
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