Right about now, stepping out in a cold-ass fashion, nearly every critic, critic wannabe, idiot with a blog and then me are collecting their thoughts, sharpening their writing utensils, polishing their wit with the intention of placing a frame of context around the First Decade of the New Millennium.  Well, that’s too good a challenge for me to leave to the professionals, so let’s let this rank amateur give his stab at summary comments.

The 2000′s.  In music.

It’s been a strange decade that I think will be remembered more for extra-musical trappings than the actual music created.  The Death of the Compact Disc; The Rise of the MP3; The Death of the Music Industry; The Rebirth of Vinyl; The Birth, Death, Rebirth and Legal Ramifications of File Sharing.  And so on, et. al.  Really.  That is not to say that no vital music has been created this decade.  I think we all could very quickly point to some great music made in the past ten years, and I will most certainly get to that in a minute.  I think it is important to take a second to note what historians will note, and I think the music will only muster a footnote.

I am quite sure that my favorite albums of the decade are probably not the most important ones made.  After all, we crashed into this decade with the last gasps of teen pop running up the charts.  N Sync broke every first week sales barrier in 2000; Radiohead freaked everyone out by going almost completely electronic; mook rap-rock and its progeny ruled the airwaves and video; hip-hop had become an urban parody of metal’s late ’80s excess; and in the indie rock underground currents began to bubble up that would eventually ride the Internet to a renaissance hinted at by the early ’90s post-Nirvana explosion.

Indie rock was in its death throws when a quartet of mama’s boy richer Manhattans put some Lower East Side attitude into their punk rock and a formerly married and bichromatic duo fell out of Detroit with a serious case of the British Bloooz.  The Strokes and The White Stripes single-handedly saved indie rock from Limp Bizkit and Korn.  Their success paved the way for similar chart and sales success for Modest Mouse, Death cab For Cutie, The Arcade Fire and The Shins, who all topped Billboard album charts.

Genre-hopping and category-defying collaboration became the norm in the post-Internet meta.  Mash-ups, R&B stars covering indie rock, rap artists raiding Ibiza and Dusseldorf.  Professional ghost songwriters saved pop from the indie oblivion by making pop smart enough for the indie kids to latch onto with a tiny bit of irony that the rest of the pop-loving public missed (deliberately or not).  Electronic music divided and subdivided and subdivided some more into the tiniest of microgenres. 

And all the while during this very interesting decade I listened to less music than ever before.  Was it just because I got old, cracking 30 midway through the ’00s?  No.  I blame it mostly on file sharing and the iPod.  File sharing because once I got shit-canned from my career in radio late in 2005 I stopped buying albums and started downloading them.  I could and did pull down pretty much anything I could and rarely spent a lot of time with anything because of the sheer volume of music I had at my fingertips.  Add to that the shuffle function in the iPod (which I finally bought into once the iPod came to Windows in 2004) and the measly 20GB (then 60GB in 2006 then 160GB in 2009) of iPod space that required me to rip at low bit rates and to not rip full albums, only the songs i liked (how could I know what songs I liked on new albums when I’d barely listened to them?!) and you can see that I became for awhile another casualty of this decade’s extra-musical occurrances.

Then last year I took a big step back from this precipice and began buying music again, though not on CD.  iTunes downloads and vinyl took over for me.  I forced myself to take the time to listen to music again in the same context I once listened to music as a teen: alone, in the dark and with my fully undivided attention.  I also discovered the MP3 blog and the anthropological properties of archiving self-released ultra-indie recordings from virtually every genre and the re-discovery of why bands who are considered vital are so vital in the first place without spending a ton of dough on CD’s. 

In the light of all this, I now give you my favorite albums of the first ten years of the 2000′s.  I do not pretend this list should be carved in tablet, painted in cave dwellings as representative of anything other than what really moved me this decade and why.  I give them in no real particular order.

Radiohead Kid A (2000)
No surprises here, right?  It’s pretty much a foregone conclusion that everyone’s gonna say Kid A right?  So Pitchfork goes Revolver on your ass and tells you Amnesiac is the better record, or everyone will point to the pay-whatever-you-feel methodology of In Rainbows as more important.  Who cares.  I heard few albums this decade that had the impact on me that this record had. 

Radiohead managed to encapsulate so much into one 50 minute record.  Minimalist electronica, musique concrete, progressive rock, psychedelia, and largess in a way that was probably the first and last great statement of the Album as Cohesive Statement.  OK, but does it rock?  Oh fuck yeah!  When the band steps into the superfuzz big balls bassline of “The National Anthem” with strutting staccato horns, the discordance and stutter step of “Idioteque” and the other-worldly guitar stomp of “Optimistic” ground it all, with moments of the ephemeral (the simply gorgeous “How to Disappear Completely”) leading you from one point to another.  It should top most lists for the simple reason that it is probably one of the great lasting pieces of musical art created regardless of decade.

Death Cab For Cutie We Have the Facts and We’re Voting Yes (2000)
How did a tiny band from Bellingham comprised of four college dropout indie rock bohemians in the midst of losing their second drummer and having just moved to the Big City find their way to reach beyond their scope and produce an album of complete brilliance that left a certain mark on indie rock for the rest of the decade?  Probably by accident, but oh what an accident!

Even if this album was their worst (and I think it’s their highmark to date) it would always place highly for me as this band was highly personal to me.  Not only did I meet them, spend a lot of time with them, give them their first national press in The Big Takeover the previous year and even tried out to replace their first drummer…but really, my connection to DCFC is that this album and this band soundtracked the early part of my Seattle years (1998-2001) in a big way.  A time of my life that, like college, I will continue to rescript in my mind in the kindest nostalgiac light possible that will almost always neglect to show a true picture of that time.  This album sounds like Seattle at that time to me.  It amped me up for the good times of the over-the-top optimism of the Dot Com Boom where 20-somethings became big ballers thanks to start-up stock options and the subsequent bust of the paper millionaires the following year.  And for me, the death of my firstborn child.

The last time I saw Ben Gibbard was probably 2002.  I parked probably ten blocks away from my office in one of the few areas of downtown Seattle where you could still park on the street for free.  I had just made it to my car when I spied Ben walking down Denny from Capitol Hill to Belltown.  I waved to him and we talked for a little while.  I offered to give him a lift to wherever he was going and he declined, saying he’d rather enjoy the let-up in the rain and continue walking.  There’s no way he can do that now, what with being Grammy nominated and married to a famous actress.  I guess i know a bit what it was like to be a Cavern Club local in bemused disbelief that the rest of the world has become hip to your local neighborhood boys…

Queens of the Stone Age Songs For the Deaf (2002)
I admit, I really didn’t dig Kyuss that much, and was only half impressed with stuff friends would include from QOTSA’s previous albums on compilations.  But when I first heard “No One Knows” and heard Dave Grohl’s drumming large and in charge and the full-on embrace of Josh Homme’s inner Jack Bruce…well, I became a desert believer.  I am continually impressed with how creamy and smooth this band sounds even when they are rocking balls out, vibing in Sabbath territory or some psychotic real estate all their own.

It also helped to root me back into the drums for my last hurrah as a drummer.  Not to say that I don’t still play drums now, but my identity is perceived now more as a multi-instrumentalist.  Sing and play guitar in one band; program electronica in another; play Americana drums in another; overdub weirdness over singer-songwriter musings…that all comes directly from Dave Grohl, who along with J Mascis and Lenny Kravitz, inspired me to write songs and play something other than drums.  But this album renewed my love affair with Dave Grohl The Drummer who completely slays on this album, playing unwordly punishing drums all while swinging like Bill Ward. 

Interpol Turn On the Bright Lights (2002)
OK, the singer sounds like Ian Curtis.  That’s the rather immediate assessment on Interpol.  That they are to me more of a mellange of early ’80s post-punk influences seems lost in the Joy Division shuffle.  Those guitars are straight out of The Chameleons UK; the languid romance of the balladry is usually passed over, the math-y rough-and-tumble start-stops and prog-ish song structures are straight out of Louisville…plus the undeniable glamor beneath the gloom was probably one of the more original statements to evolve from this band.  And once again it was all passed over.  I mean, you realize this guy sounds just like Ian Curtis, right? 

Sure, Interpol cannot deny their influences (though early on in their career they tried their damnedest to do just that).  It’s The Sound and Comsat Angels, but updated for a new millennium, beefier, brawnier.  I love who they successfully rip off so much that I can’t help but love this band, though their subsequent offerings have sadly been lesser affairs.  The word out of the band is that the next one goes back to this earlier sound.  We shall see early next year whether that is true.

Ryan Adams Rock N Roll / Love Is Hell
It’s strange for me to place these albums in my top ten best of the decade when most would consider these albums to be some of the worst, self-indulgent ripped-off horseshit of all time, let alone just these past ten years.  Let me assure you that this is not pure subversiveness.  I love these albums and they meant a lot to me at the time and continue to hold strong for me.

I have been a Ryan Adams fan since his days fronting Whiskeytown in the early ’90s.  It is their music, alongside Uncle Tupelo and its offshoots, that really helped me to gain an appreciation for the country music that I grew up surrounded by in western Kentucky.  Ryan was equal parts country, redneck and indie skater cool all at the same time, but I always thought his rock side was more pure and interesting.  Ryan followed that ’80s college rock muse to its fiery end in 2003 with these two albums, on the former combining early ’90s Britpop anthems with jangly post-punk nervousness, and on the latter making a love letter to The Smiths and Jeff Buckley.  The songwriting on Rock N Roll is largely disposable, which isn’t necessarily a slag.  Good rock and roll need not mean anything nor be any deeper than the most surface of feelings.  Love Is Hell however attempts to make good on its title’s premise, and at least on a couple of songs Ryan slams that fucker home.  “This House Is Not For Sale” still gives me the chills and sounds as heartfelt a plea as has ever been committed to wax; “The Shadowlands” makes good on the cinematic promise of earlier piano ballads. 

The number one attraction for me is probably also the number one detraction for many.  These albums are horribly derivative.  You know who rips on blatantly for each song.  Johnny Marr here, Noel Gallagher there, Counting Crows here, U2 there…you get the picture.  But especially Rock N Roll comes across as a big sloppy love letter to the music that Ryan Adams loves, and it helps me forgive him these transgressions having read the completely stream-of-consciousness fucked up ramblings he gives as interviews and blog postings.  I think he had a lark to bust out some rock for about nine months and then, having decided he’d rather not present himself that way anymore (either because of some honest soul searching or because the critics shined on him for it) he retreated almost completely into the Gold era California ’70s sound he’s plumbed almost exclusively ever since.  Well, I don’t swing that way and have been by and large disappointed with his subsequent work.  C’mon Ryan, fuck them all and give me another album like Rock N Roll, bro!

Band of Horses Everything All the Time (2006)
Another one kinda like Death Cab, but slightly different.  How is it you can watch more of your peers emerge from a popular but I thought pretty average band like Carissa’s Wierd with a shot completely out of left field?  Well, I saw it happen again when I first saw Horses , whom I opened for in my last year in Seattle.  I liked what I heard but had no idea they had an album like this lurking up their sleeves.

I have no idea what Ben Bridwell is singing about, and when I do catch the words peaking out they sound largely like non-narrative nonsense.  You could sing the phone book in the languid South Carolina drawl encased in three feet of solid reverb and delivered in that Perry Farrell meets Doug Martsch alien falsetto and I would fall in love.  It’s downhome kudzu and early ’80s Liverpool discomfort all at once.  It’s transcendent and earthy all at once.  Like a Neil Young for the indie rock generation, although in a less direct way than J Mascis was for the ’90s. 

Sadly, their second effort was not as effects-laden and Bridwell’s dumb lyrics detract from the overall beauty.  Still, the first time at bat for Band of Horses knocked that shit out the park.

M83 Saturdays=Youth (2008)
OK, everyone fell over themselves last year (me included) to make John Hughes comparisons to this masterpiece.  Yeah, there is that Big ’80s feel to this album in spades, that largess of cheaky north U.K. mid ’80s arena rock from Simple Minds and U2.  But is not just that bigness that is channeled here.  There are moments of dreampop ethereality, Pink Floyd languid English psychedelia, shoegaze glide guitars, and extremely over-the-top borderline emo of the lyrics and those damn voiceovers.  “I’m already 15 and I fear my life is over…” yeah, we all felt like that at one point in our lives and I still for the life of my can’t tell if M83 feels it, is merely making a period piece or relishing the irony of such campy emotiveness.  Doesn’t really matter to me, because it plays on all the nostalgia points for me while pointing forward in the instrumental electronic parts towards bringing rock guitars back to the dance floor like those Manchester dudes loved to do 20 years ago, but without the clownish druggy vibe, replaced with a painful earnestness that is as refreshing as it is sophomoric. 

Plus “Skin of the Night” is the best Hounds of Love outtake this side of “Burning Bridge”.  Seriously.  Kate should sue.

Deerhunter Microcastle (2008)
This is the band that helped me fall in love with Guided By Voices all over again.  How?  Because this band has single-handedly renewed the rampant record collector ennui to indie rock.  And i don’t mean the indie rock High Fidelity snob who lords their aesthetic superiority over everyone.  I’m talking about that guy who blows every single coin he can find buying pretty much any record he can get his hands on.  And that was GBV’s aesthetic in the ’90s and is now pushed forward by Bradley Cox and company.

Very little is outside of Deerhunter’s scope.  Sonic Youth post-industrial clanging chords in odd tunings; dreampop; ’60s girl group sweetness; gothic claustrophobia; tossed-off lo-fi lullabies…this band encompasses it all, with an anthem in “Nothing Ever Happened” that is every bit the “Teen Age Riot” for the next generation. 

The other thing so GBV about this band is that Deerhunter are beyond prolific, so much so that side projects abound, like the 4AD gothic ambience of Atlas Sound and the lower profile Lotus Plaza.  No side of the muse is unexplored, just placed in its proper place.  The first band since Radiohead to really leave me with the sense of anticipation for what they are going to do next, where else they can go before mediocrity catches up.