See “Best of 2008” for a general introduction.
Not to harp on about it but, musically, 2001 decidedly did not suck (take that, Pitchfork!). Surely all a year needs is a handful of records that end up dear to someone’s heart (even if it’s for less than happy reasons, like the soundtrack that gets you through something) and, voila!, that person’s had a good year for music. Of course, in typical James fashion, most of my favourites weren’t so at the time, but at least 5 of them are my favourite records of any year. I will say, though, that perhaps 2001 wasn’t great at brand new – of my top
Two glaring omissions from my top
Garbage’s beautifulgarbage was a severe disappointment I
haven’t been bothered to attempt to reassess since, except I now admit the “go
baby go go” hook from Cherry Lips is pretty catchy. 2005’s Bleed Like Me was a
nice back-to-basics return to form, I think.
I once heard New Jersey Nu Metal outfit Ill Nino described
as “Soulfly for people who can’t read”. That is perhaps a little unfair – it’s
not exactly dumb jock metal – but I do perhaps have to file this under guilty
pleasure. Like 36 Crazyfists, I discovered them on a Kerrang! compilation CD.
Perhaps if I’d heard loads of other bands first I wouldn’t then have given them
the time of day (this is the nasty little thing I always think when people
suggest Coldplay is their favourite band), but Revolution / Revolucion was one
of the first things/CDs I ever bought from amazon (what a novelty that was). I
even went to the 15th anniversary show at the Islington Academy!
A handful of other 2001 nuggets:
- This was the year of Staind – Break the Cycle. True story
- Slayer’s God Hates Us All, something of a comeback after a few years of dicking about (drummer Dave Lombardo leaving, for the second time, in 1992, covers album Undisputed Attitude in 1996, 1998’s poorly-received experiment Diabolus in Musica) is one of their best records
- REM’s Reveal contains my favourite ever REM song, Imitation of Life
- Bob Dylan’s “Love and Theft” was the second in what would turn out to be a trilogy of great modern Dylan albums
- Rammstein’s Mutter happened
- Fugazi’s final album, The Argument, came out
- Radiohead’s Amnesiac is overall not a patch on its predecessor, IMO
- Davey Havok’s golden era continued nicely, this year with full vocal duties on Son of Sam’s Songs from the Earth and some guest vocals on Tiger Army’s sophomore record Tiger Army II: Power of Moonlite (I worry that Davey is now too cool and successful to guest on Nick 13 and Co’s albums these days, but that’s just speculation on my part)
- Jimmy Eat World’s Bleed American, containing their best known song, The Middle, was renamed as self-titled after the events of 9/11
- American Head Charge are definitely better than you might remember. Just so you Know was one of my most loved songs at the time
Around then I used to think Nine Inch Nails weren’t “guitary” enough so I didn’t have a chance with an electronic double album even with the realisations that there’s beautiful acoustic piano on there (Avril 14th sounded familiar) and what the I in IDM stands for (yes I am that impressionable)! I might not even have checked out the back catalogue until after 2014’s Syro came out. I am of course glad I did. I was never very good at doing anything while it was cool (I am not a hipster, given I would always do it after it was cool, not before. Except champion introverts in the workplace, but that’s a story for another time).
Björk – Vespertine
It seems derogatory to say Björk has a different ‘gimmick’ for each record. What would be a better word? Theme? Inspiration? If 1997’s Homogenic was incredibly strings-heavy, 2004’s Medulla was largely processed and unprocessed vocals, 2007’s Volta was brass and beats, 2011’s Biophilia and 2017’s Utopia were made-up instruments about biology, nature, and the environment, 2015’s Vulnicura was a break-up album with lots of strings again, then about 2001’s Vespertine…turning to Wikipedia… “With the rising popularity of Napster and music downloads, [Bjork] decided to use instruments whose sounds would not be compromised when downloaded and played on a computer, including the harp, the celesta, clavichord, strings, and custom music boxes. Assisted by the duo Matmos, Björk created "microbeats" from various household sounds, such as that of shuffling cards and ice being cracked.” Well OK then. Sounds fun. It sounds fantastic, in fact. And many of the songs feature some of the inextricably Icelandic songstress’s most glorious vocal melodies.
Converge – Jane Doe
I was aware of this Massachusetts hardcore band for a while – I remember such things as a review of a show they played in a hall in Canterbury, and a “why I love…” feature with Thursday’s Geoff Rickley (both in Kerrang!), and I’m sure I’d seen the Jane Doe face in a few places. But it wasn’t until I cut my hair and got a job in the city and started paying taxes that I finally gave them a listen. There’s very little that can shock me with its heaviness these days (it’s a reason I sometimes pick up on pop music in a big way – e.g. Lily Allen in 2009, Taylor Swift’s new album in 2020 – given it’s a genre that for me is different to what I’m used to listening to) but back then my face and hair were blown back by the huge and off-kilter riffage (the band once suggested that, I think probably with their tongues at least slightly in their cheeks, the reason their music is complex is because all of the good simple riffs have been taken) and Jacob Bannon’s gloriously unrelenting screeching. Bannon’s vocals are, in a way, incredibly un-musical (although I think there’s an argument to be made for the phrasing and rhythm) but for pure authentic unmatched emotion they are unparalleled. In my least favourite piece of writing I ever did, I tried but mostly failed to get across at length how wonderful Bannon’s lyrics are on this record – depressing and poetic and sad and beautiful – not that you can make them out (I read once that maybe he never actually vocalised the words he wrote and just made the noises). My theory that Converge excel at extremes – fast (the gut-wrenching Homewrecker or Heaven in Her Arms) and slow (the magnificent epic title track) – but not so much in between, began with this record, but luckily for me it never dwells in mid-tempo for too long.
Envy – All the Footprints You've Ever Left and the Fear Expecting Ahead
In 2003’s entry I rambled on about how Envy’s records all blur a bit for me because I got into them all (other than the most recent two) at the same time. If there is another stand-out alongside 2003’s A Dead Sinking Story then this elaborately titled record from 2001 is it. The 8 minute final track Your Shoes and the World to Come (with these titles, Red Sparowes would be proud) is probably my favourite track by the Japanese noise-niks, and is perhaps the best example of their being both post-rock (the first few minutes of interlocking guitar instrumenting) and post-hardcore (at 3:33 when the raging vocals come in and all hell breaks loose). I listen to this track on its own all the time, but in preparing this blog I went for a walk with my daughter and, starting the album from the beginning, was duly reminded how great the rest of it is too. Very dry and basic production, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Four Tet – Pause
Having featured some of the later records from ex-Fridge (post-rock band) production wonderkid Kieran Hebden, I am beginning to wonder if perhaps records like Rounds and Everything Ecstatic are more ambitious and fully realised but Pause isn’t underwhelming, it’s only a little smaller perhaps. It was my entry point so I love it for that I suppose, and it has some lovely little acoustic guitar bits I tried to learn back when I tried to play guitar.
Incubus – Morning View
This is perhaps the most perfect product, objectively speaking, of a time and a place. The writing, the sound of the record (largely, but not always, more chilled out than its predecessors), the title, and the artwork are all tied up with the Malibu location. While there are some individual stand-outs (opening track Nice to Know You, which serves as a kind of bridge between the heavier previous material and the cooler vibes coming later on the record, the gorgeous but somewhat sad ballad 11am, experimental epic closer Aqueous Transmission) and a few filler-y duds along the way (controversially, I count Are You In? among them), it really works best as a whole. The perfect album to relax with outside in the sun with a beer.
Jamiroquai – A Funk Odyssey
The last great record from dancing-man-in-a-hat Jay Kay and his underrated but equally vital companions (is there a better rhythm section in pop?) before they became far less prolific (this was their fifth album in eight years, and they’ve only released three since) and less, well, good. Because it is pop-adjacent (it’s funk I suppose, but not, on record at least, funk in the way a funk band is funk) and Jay Kay is a largely unmitigated twat, I of course hated the band at the time, but I made myself give it the time of day after a friend of mine, whose favourite band Jamiroquai was, killed himself in October of this year. I soon grew to love most of the singles, but I also discovered that there was a jazzy less song-oriented side to the band, which a) gives them more cred, and b) it turns out I would end up loving more generally. That said, A Funk Odyssey isn’t about stretched-out didgeridoo solos, it is very much song-based but with an incredibly high hit-rate they would never approach again. The sorrowful ballads Corner of the Earth and Picture of My Life are particular highlights, as well as Beverley Knight’s feature on Main Vein, and not even one too many love wordplays in the lyrics can detract from it.
It seems derogatory to say Björk has a different ‘gimmick’ for each record. What would be a better word? Theme? Inspiration? If 1997’s Homogenic was incredibly strings-heavy, 2004’s Medulla was largely processed and unprocessed vocals, 2007’s Volta was brass and beats, 2011’s Biophilia and 2017’s Utopia were made-up instruments about biology, nature, and the environment, 2015’s Vulnicura was a break-up album with lots of strings again, then about 2001’s Vespertine…turning to Wikipedia… “With the rising popularity of Napster and music downloads, [Bjork] decided to use instruments whose sounds would not be compromised when downloaded and played on a computer, including the harp, the celesta, clavichord, strings, and custom music boxes. Assisted by the duo Matmos, Björk created "microbeats" from various household sounds, such as that of shuffling cards and ice being cracked.” Well OK then. Sounds fun. It sounds fantastic, in fact. And many of the songs feature some of the inextricably Icelandic songstress’s most glorious vocal melodies.
Converge – Jane Doe
I was aware of this Massachusetts hardcore band for a while – I remember such things as a review of a show they played in a hall in Canterbury, and a “why I love…” feature with Thursday’s Geoff Rickley (both in Kerrang!), and I’m sure I’d seen the Jane Doe face in a few places. But it wasn’t until I cut my hair and got a job in the city and started paying taxes that I finally gave them a listen. There’s very little that can shock me with its heaviness these days (it’s a reason I sometimes pick up on pop music in a big way – e.g. Lily Allen in 2009, Taylor Swift’s new album in 2020 – given it’s a genre that for me is different to what I’m used to listening to) but back then my face and hair were blown back by the huge and off-kilter riffage (the band once suggested that, I think probably with their tongues at least slightly in their cheeks, the reason their music is complex is because all of the good simple riffs have been taken) and Jacob Bannon’s gloriously unrelenting screeching. Bannon’s vocals are, in a way, incredibly un-musical (although I think there’s an argument to be made for the phrasing and rhythm) but for pure authentic unmatched emotion they are unparalleled. In my least favourite piece of writing I ever did, I tried but mostly failed to get across at length how wonderful Bannon’s lyrics are on this record – depressing and poetic and sad and beautiful – not that you can make them out (I read once that maybe he never actually vocalised the words he wrote and just made the noises). My theory that Converge excel at extremes – fast (the gut-wrenching Homewrecker or Heaven in Her Arms) and slow (the magnificent epic title track) – but not so much in between, began with this record, but luckily for me it never dwells in mid-tempo for too long.
Envy – All the Footprints You've Ever Left and the Fear Expecting Ahead
In 2003’s entry I rambled on about how Envy’s records all blur a bit for me because I got into them all (other than the most recent two) at the same time. If there is another stand-out alongside 2003’s A Dead Sinking Story then this elaborately titled record from 2001 is it. The 8 minute final track Your Shoes and the World to Come (with these titles, Red Sparowes would be proud) is probably my favourite track by the Japanese noise-niks, and is perhaps the best example of their being both post-rock (the first few minutes of interlocking guitar instrumenting) and post-hardcore (at 3:33 when the raging vocals come in and all hell breaks loose). I listen to this track on its own all the time, but in preparing this blog I went for a walk with my daughter and, starting the album from the beginning, was duly reminded how great the rest of it is too. Very dry and basic production, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.
Four Tet – Pause
Having featured some of the later records from ex-Fridge (post-rock band) production wonderkid Kieran Hebden, I am beginning to wonder if perhaps records like Rounds and Everything Ecstatic are more ambitious and fully realised but Pause isn’t underwhelming, it’s only a little smaller perhaps. It was my entry point so I love it for that I suppose, and it has some lovely little acoustic guitar bits I tried to learn back when I tried to play guitar.
Incubus – Morning View
This is perhaps the most perfect product, objectively speaking, of a time and a place. The writing, the sound of the record (largely, but not always, more chilled out than its predecessors), the title, and the artwork are all tied up with the Malibu location. While there are some individual stand-outs (opening track Nice to Know You, which serves as a kind of bridge between the heavier previous material and the cooler vibes coming later on the record, the gorgeous but somewhat sad ballad 11am, experimental epic closer Aqueous Transmission) and a few filler-y duds along the way (controversially, I count Are You In? among them), it really works best as a whole. The perfect album to relax with outside in the sun with a beer.
Jamiroquai – A Funk Odyssey
The last great record from dancing-man-in-a-hat Jay Kay and his underrated but equally vital companions (is there a better rhythm section in pop?) before they became far less prolific (this was their fifth album in eight years, and they’ve only released three since) and less, well, good. Because it is pop-adjacent (it’s funk I suppose, but not, on record at least, funk in the way a funk band is funk) and Jay Kay is a largely unmitigated twat, I of course hated the band at the time, but I made myself give it the time of day after a friend of mine, whose favourite band Jamiroquai was, killed himself in October of this year. I soon grew to love most of the singles, but I also discovered that there was a jazzy less song-oriented side to the band, which a) gives them more cred, and b) it turns out I would end up loving more generally. That said, A Funk Odyssey isn’t about stretched-out didgeridoo solos, it is very much song-based but with an incredibly high hit-rate they would never approach again. The sorrowful ballads Corner of the Earth and Picture of My Life are particular highlights, as well as Beverley Knight’s feature on Main Vein, and not even one too many love wordplays in the lyrics can detract from it.
John Frusciante – To Record Only Water for Ten Days
Notable for many things, not least:
An old friend I used to get the bus to school with was always banging on about two bands – Lamb, and Life Without Buildings. Lamb is an electronica duo whose singer, Lou Rhodes, has sung with The Cinematic Orchestra. While that should have been enough to prompt me to check them out, it wasn’t until 2014’s Backspace Unwind (what a wonderful record that is) that I finally did. Incidentally, 2001’s What Sound features one of their best songs, Gabriel. Well anyway, Any Other City is the only studio album the Scottish indie band Life Without Buildings (great name) ever released. Funnily enough, it wasn’t until 2014’s re-release of the album for Record Store Day (it featured on some of the best-RSD-releases-to-spend-your-money-on lists at the time) that I got into it. Sue Tomkins’ talky/yelped vocals are most certainly not for everyone, however.
Mogwai – Rock Action
While it sometimes feels like a minor entry in the Scottish post-rock overlords’ catalogue, that isn’t really saying much. It does seem quite small in many ways, small sound, short length – at 38 minutes, it’s their shortest studio album despite 8 and 9 minute centrepieces You Don’t Know Jesus / Two Rights Make One Wrong. It nevertheless features some of the most iconic Mogwai moments – the fore-mentioned epics, the title which later became the name of their record label, frequent use of (oft-processed) vocals, and most especially for a band whose youtube videos number in the thousands, there’s a video for the track Take Me Somewhere Nice, which features a Ken Wong painting of a girl with a goldfish bowl on her head, and that’s it, which has over 82 million views. I’m not quite sure what happened there but it seems to be the last remaining place of beauty and kindness on the internet. There are over 26 thousand comments and I’m willing to bet most of them are either positive (603k thumbs up, 13k thumbs down), or starkly emotional.
Muse – Origin of Symmetry
The quintessential Muse album perhaps. Where 1999’s debut Showbiz attracted accusations of Radiohead-copying, and I only recall Sunburn and Cave as being any good, and from 2003’s Absolution they became far too prog to handle. As supremely talented as whirlwind frontman Matt Bellamy certainly is, he does, rather like Dream Theater (so again, great players, so-so songwriters), wear his influences quite obviously on his sleeve. While later references to Queen and Chopin were more overt, the Rachmaninov ripping-off on Origin of Symmetry is perhaps more subtle, and less likely to be picked up by the fan base (for the record, I would not normally be any good at picking that sort of thing up either, I just got lucky in this case). And his voice can grate a bit. But hey, that’s fine I guess. While most of what Muse did after this just pissed me off unconditionally (again, my problem, not theirs or anyone else’s), everything they did here landed for me. I loved all the singles (Plug In Baby, New Born, Bliss, Hyper Music, and the stroke of genius that was the megaphone-vocal-ed Feeling Good cover) unreservedly. Indeed, Hyper Music is one of those times where a mainstream indie song somehow manages to be really heavy! In terms of some of the non-singles, despite what I wrote a second ago, the piano intro to Space Dementia is a lot of fun (no surprise, I tried to learn it), and Citizen Erased and Darkshines are just as good as the singles.
Opeth – Blackwater Park
6 albums in the 7 years 1998-2005. All of them classics. If you’re an Opeth fan, what a time to be alive! Blackwater Park is, I think, the quintessential Opeth record. It has the most perfect balance of all Opeth’s features and tendencies – heavy/light, harsh/clean vocals, brutality/Steven Wilson’s clean production rounding off some of the sharper edges, death metal/jazz and prog. While mastermind brain-in-a-jar Mikael Akerfeldt writes most of the songs, there is not a weak link among the players here; they all give the performance of their lives.
Roots Manuva – Run Come Save Me
This was the second album from British rapper Rodney Smith. As I’ve said before, I am far from a connoisseur or aficionado of hip hop. Because I like so little of it, it is NOT to say that what I do like must be particularly good. Please don’t think that. I’m getting a bit of déjà vu here in what I like so much about Roots Manuva – I think I’ve written it elsewhere but I can’t immediately recall where – the sheer sound he makes with his voice; his timbre and flow more than make up for his godawful diction. The production on Run Come Save Me isn’t as melancholy and dreamy and claustrophobic as it is on his debut, but on a track like Witness (1 Hope) its huge awesomeness works just as well. These aren’t just perfunctory beats that hang around in the background while the rappers do their thing, most of them are so good I could quite happily listen to them as instrumentals. There is also something charmingly English about the lyrics, best personified in the iconic line from Witness (1 Hope) “Cause right now, I see clearer than most. I sit here contending with this cheese on toast.” Apparently American audiences didn’t recognise the English phrase for “grilled cheese”.
The Appleseed Cast – Low Level Owl Vols. I & II
So close to being a palindrome! So close! An epic double album here for their third and fourth studio outputs, good and consistent enough to be widely considered the band’s magnum opus. Now, I wanted to automatically accuse them of being post-rock, but I always think that then actually listen and realise there is still a lot of, well, rock structure in there, plus a lot of math-rock and indie and emo too. More’s the better.
Thursday – Full Collapse
While there are some clear duds on this in a way that there aren’t on 2003’s War All the Time, it wins as the criminally underrated New Jersey post-hardcore band’s finest hour for me. I am a sucker for book-ending and the robotic A0001 and i1100 do that perfectly here (they didn’t quite pull that off playing the whole record live), but then you have tracks like Understanding in a Car Crash, Autobiography of a Nation (I nearly learned to play this on drums), Cross Out the Eyes, and the absolute masterpiece that is Paris in Flames (Those guitars! Those spoken word sections!).
Zero 7 – Simple Things
I was familiar with In the Waiting Line from the Garden State soundtrack (which also introduced to be the mesmerising Let Go by Frou Frou) and I was aware that Sia has worked with this electronica duo, but it wasn’t until preparing for this list that I listened to this. When I did I enjoyed it so much I listened to it again a few times, which is rarely something I do these days, so here it is.
Tool – Lateralus
Slightly out of alphabetical order, I have saved the best until last. Quite possibly my favourite album ever. At one point I had it second to The Mars Volta’s Deloused in the Comatorium, but Lateralus I still listen to a lot. And certainly every winter (the CD was a Christmas present from my sister, and I remember listening to it while playing the N64 Mission Impossible game – shoddy but I loved it. Incidentally I listened to Aenima while playing Final Fantasy VII, so there might be some links there. I would never listen to separate music while playing a video game now, especially something like FF7 where the music is a huge important element, but there was apparently a time when I did).
Notable for many things, not least:
- Frusciante’s third solo record but arguably to most listeners his first that isn’t merely ‘historically interesting
- Lots of non-guitar elements but plenty of superlative guitar work nonetheless
- One of the best tracks is a 71 second guitar interlude
- One of the best tracks is a sub 3-minute instrumental interlude
- Plenty of straight-up good songs
- Fan site ‘invisible-movement.net’ takes its name from a track
Life Without Buildings – Any Other City
An old friend I used to get the bus to school with was always banging on about two bands – Lamb, and Life Without Buildings. Lamb is an electronica duo whose singer, Lou Rhodes, has sung with The Cinematic Orchestra. While that should have been enough to prompt me to check them out, it wasn’t until 2014’s Backspace Unwind (what a wonderful record that is) that I finally did. Incidentally, 2001’s What Sound features one of their best songs, Gabriel. Well anyway, Any Other City is the only studio album the Scottish indie band Life Without Buildings (great name) ever released. Funnily enough, it wasn’t until 2014’s re-release of the album for Record Store Day (it featured on some of the best-RSD-releases-to-spend-your-money-on lists at the time) that I got into it. Sue Tomkins’ talky/yelped vocals are most certainly not for everyone, however.
Mogwai – Rock Action
While it sometimes feels like a minor entry in the Scottish post-rock overlords’ catalogue, that isn’t really saying much. It does seem quite small in many ways, small sound, short length – at 38 minutes, it’s their shortest studio album despite 8 and 9 minute centrepieces You Don’t Know Jesus / Two Rights Make One Wrong. It nevertheless features some of the most iconic Mogwai moments – the fore-mentioned epics, the title which later became the name of their record label, frequent use of (oft-processed) vocals, and most especially for a band whose youtube videos number in the thousands, there’s a video for the track Take Me Somewhere Nice, which features a Ken Wong painting of a girl with a goldfish bowl on her head, and that’s it, which has over 82 million views. I’m not quite sure what happened there but it seems to be the last remaining place of beauty and kindness on the internet. There are over 26 thousand comments and I’m willing to bet most of them are either positive (603k thumbs up, 13k thumbs down), or starkly emotional.
Muse – Origin of Symmetry
The quintessential Muse album perhaps. Where 1999’s debut Showbiz attracted accusations of Radiohead-copying, and I only recall Sunburn and Cave as being any good, and from 2003’s Absolution they became far too prog to handle. As supremely talented as whirlwind frontman Matt Bellamy certainly is, he does, rather like Dream Theater (so again, great players, so-so songwriters), wear his influences quite obviously on his sleeve. While later references to Queen and Chopin were more overt, the Rachmaninov ripping-off on Origin of Symmetry is perhaps more subtle, and less likely to be picked up by the fan base (for the record, I would not normally be any good at picking that sort of thing up either, I just got lucky in this case). And his voice can grate a bit. But hey, that’s fine I guess. While most of what Muse did after this just pissed me off unconditionally (again, my problem, not theirs or anyone else’s), everything they did here landed for me. I loved all the singles (Plug In Baby, New Born, Bliss, Hyper Music, and the stroke of genius that was the megaphone-vocal-ed Feeling Good cover) unreservedly. Indeed, Hyper Music is one of those times where a mainstream indie song somehow manages to be really heavy! In terms of some of the non-singles, despite what I wrote a second ago, the piano intro to Space Dementia is a lot of fun (no surprise, I tried to learn it), and Citizen Erased and Darkshines are just as good as the singles.
Opeth – Blackwater Park
6 albums in the 7 years 1998-2005. All of them classics. If you’re an Opeth fan, what a time to be alive! Blackwater Park is, I think, the quintessential Opeth record. It has the most perfect balance of all Opeth’s features and tendencies – heavy/light, harsh/clean vocals, brutality/Steven Wilson’s clean production rounding off some of the sharper edges, death metal/jazz and prog. While mastermind brain-in-a-jar Mikael Akerfeldt writes most of the songs, there is not a weak link among the players here; they all give the performance of their lives.
Roots Manuva – Run Come Save Me
This was the second album from British rapper Rodney Smith. As I’ve said before, I am far from a connoisseur or aficionado of hip hop. Because I like so little of it, it is NOT to say that what I do like must be particularly good. Please don’t think that. I’m getting a bit of déjà vu here in what I like so much about Roots Manuva – I think I’ve written it elsewhere but I can’t immediately recall where – the sheer sound he makes with his voice; his timbre and flow more than make up for his godawful diction. The production on Run Come Save Me isn’t as melancholy and dreamy and claustrophobic as it is on his debut, but on a track like Witness (1 Hope) its huge awesomeness works just as well. These aren’t just perfunctory beats that hang around in the background while the rappers do their thing, most of them are so good I could quite happily listen to them as instrumentals. There is also something charmingly English about the lyrics, best personified in the iconic line from Witness (1 Hope) “Cause right now, I see clearer than most. I sit here contending with this cheese on toast.” Apparently American audiences didn’t recognise the English phrase for “grilled cheese”.
The Appleseed Cast – Low Level Owl Vols. I & II
So close to being a palindrome! So close! An epic double album here for their third and fourth studio outputs, good and consistent enough to be widely considered the band’s magnum opus. Now, I wanted to automatically accuse them of being post-rock, but I always think that then actually listen and realise there is still a lot of, well, rock structure in there, plus a lot of math-rock and indie and emo too. More’s the better.
Thursday – Full Collapse
While there are some clear duds on this in a way that there aren’t on 2003’s War All the Time, it wins as the criminally underrated New Jersey post-hardcore band’s finest hour for me. I am a sucker for book-ending and the robotic A0001 and i1100 do that perfectly here (they didn’t quite pull that off playing the whole record live), but then you have tracks like Understanding in a Car Crash, Autobiography of a Nation (I nearly learned to play this on drums), Cross Out the Eyes, and the absolute masterpiece that is Paris in Flames (Those guitars! Those spoken word sections!).
Zero 7 – Simple Things
I was familiar with In the Waiting Line from the Garden State soundtrack (which also introduced to be the mesmerising Let Go by Frou Frou) and I was aware that Sia has worked with this electronica duo, but it wasn’t until preparing for this list that I listened to this. When I did I enjoyed it so much I listened to it again a few times, which is rarely something I do these days, so here it is.
Tool – Lateralus
Slightly out of alphabetical order, I have saved the best until last. Quite possibly my favourite album ever. At one point I had it second to The Mars Volta’s Deloused in the Comatorium, but Lateralus I still listen to a lot. And certainly every winter (the CD was a Christmas present from my sister, and I remember listening to it while playing the N64 Mission Impossible game – shoddy but I loved it. Incidentally I listened to Aenima while playing Final Fantasy VII, so there might be some links there. I would never listen to separate music while playing a video game now, especially something like FF7 where the music is a huge important element, but there was apparently a time when I did).
Anyway, I didn’t take to the LA-based alt-metal masters right away, and for a time this was only my third favourite Tool album, but there was a time when Tool clicked and the music became everything. I would emotionally respond to nearly every song, and my favourite would change by the day (this lasted until at least 2003 when I went to university and discovered file sharing and got hold of Salival and heard Maynard’s voice on something new all over again). Later on I would come to appreciate how tricky the time signatures and difficult Danny Carey’s mind-bending drumming are, but for a while I just enjoyed it on an emotional and, yes ok, spiritual level. There was, and in some cases, is, still plenty about it that is off-kilter and fascinating – the surreal album artwork (which didn’t become a cliché until 2019’s Fear Inoculum – it could have earlier but 10,000 Days’ artwork was spectacular), the interludes, the running time of nearly 80 minutes on a single CD, the vocals oddly low in the mix, the sound of an elevator at the start (whenever I hear that sound in a lift I start humming the opening to The Grudge), the 20-second long scream near the end of The Grudge, the interludes, the little triplet things in ‘hit single’ Schism, the fact that Parabol and Parabola are one song but stretched across two tracks (I explained this to my mate and he sighed and said “yeah OK, I get it, it’s weird”), the mathematical Fibonacci sequence in the rhythm of the vocals of the title track, the repeated simple lyric during what is almost an acoustic guitar ballad Disposition (I want this track played at my funeral), the dark and slightly murky but beautiful production (I don’t think the increased clarity of the later records suits them all that much – on Fear Inoculum, the only good thing about the bass is its sound, but never has Justin Chancellor sounded better than on Lateralus).
The lyrics to Lateralus are both the main reason Tool fans think they’re enlightened, and a focal point for Tool critics. This confuses me slightly. Yes, it’s chock full of imagery and metaphor (I quoted the lyrics to the title track throughout my university dissertation on Bayesian statistics; but when I showed my friend he said there was “too much going on”) but surely it isn’t a stretch to work out what “The Grudge” is about (I’ll give you a clue, it’s about…a grudge. Specifically holding onto / letting go of one.) or what “Schism” means (it’s about the schism between two people arguing and reconciling). “The Patient” is about singer Maynard James Keenan’s mother’s illness where “Patient” takes on both meanings). “Ticks and Leeches” is about human parasites. “Disposition” is just a small piece of poetry (“mention this to me, and watch the weather change”), no need to get offended. “Reflection” is not a pretentious word. Triad doesn’t have any lyrics. Eon Blue Apocalypse is about guitarist Adam Jones’ dog (called Eon Blue) dying. Parabol(a) and the title track are a bit more spiritual, perhaps, but I still don’t think they’re all that dense. So while it might look it, the lyrics aren’t actually trying to be all that clever (sometimes it seems in music criticism world the worst crime you can commit is quote from a book you’ve read) and most of them are simply about very basic, human things. Not nonsense, not pretentious, and certainly not un-relatable.
Another criticism levelled at Tool is that basically all of their songs are in drop-D (presumably that means the key of D-minor). OK, so what? I can’t even write one song in drop-D yet Adam Jones has written of dozens of incredibly distinct songs in the same key. Imagine making so much out of so little. That is the sort of thing classical composers used to do as exercises in cleverness. As a side note, Danny Carey tunes his drums to D so that might be another reason they often sound so good.
2001, a playlist
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6fJMoEm87n0cK7mnGZxlpz?si=KuDgt91QSdC5XK9cju00Sg
The lyrics to Lateralus are both the main reason Tool fans think they’re enlightened, and a focal point for Tool critics. This confuses me slightly. Yes, it’s chock full of imagery and metaphor (I quoted the lyrics to the title track throughout my university dissertation on Bayesian statistics; but when I showed my friend he said there was “too much going on”) but surely it isn’t a stretch to work out what “The Grudge” is about (I’ll give you a clue, it’s about…a grudge. Specifically holding onto / letting go of one.) or what “Schism” means (it’s about the schism between two people arguing and reconciling). “The Patient” is about singer Maynard James Keenan’s mother’s illness where “Patient” takes on both meanings). “Ticks and Leeches” is about human parasites. “Disposition” is just a small piece of poetry (“mention this to me, and watch the weather change”), no need to get offended. “Reflection” is not a pretentious word. Triad doesn’t have any lyrics. Eon Blue Apocalypse is about guitarist Adam Jones’ dog (called Eon Blue) dying. Parabol(a) and the title track are a bit more spiritual, perhaps, but I still don’t think they’re all that dense. So while it might look it, the lyrics aren’t actually trying to be all that clever (sometimes it seems in music criticism world the worst crime you can commit is quote from a book you’ve read) and most of them are simply about very basic, human things. Not nonsense, not pretentious, and certainly not un-relatable.
Another criticism levelled at Tool is that basically all of their songs are in drop-D (presumably that means the key of D-minor). OK, so what? I can’t even write one song in drop-D yet Adam Jones has written of dozens of incredibly distinct songs in the same key. Imagine making so much out of so little. That is the sort of thing classical composers used to do as exercises in cleverness. As a side note, Danny Carey tunes his drums to D so that might be another reason they often sound so good.
2001, a playlist
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6fJMoEm87n0cK7mnGZxlpz?si=KuDgt91QSdC5XK9cju00Sg
- American Head Charge – Just so you Know
- Aphex Twin – Avril 14th
- Ash – Burn Baby Burn
- Bjork – Hidden Place
- Bob Dylan – Mississippi
- Converge – Heaven in her Arms
- Daft Punk – Aerodynamic
- Death by Stereo –
- Elbow – Newborn
- Envy – Your Shoes and the World to Come
- Explosions in the Sky – Greet Death
- Faithless – We Come 1
- Four Tet – Everything is Alright
- Fugazi – Argument
- Garbage – Cherry Lips (Go Baby Go)
- Ill Nino – What Comes Around
- Incubus – 11am
- Jamiroquai – Corner of the Earth
- Jay-Z – Izzo (H.O.V.A.)
- Jimmy Eat World – The Middle
- John Frusciante – Ramparts
- Lamb – Gabriel
- Life Without Buildings – New Town
- Low – Sunflower
- Mogwai – Dial : Revenge
- Muse – Hyper Music
- NAS – Ether
- Opeth – Blackwater Park
- Radiohead – Knives Out
- Rammstein – Sonne
- R.E.M. – Imitation of Life
- Roots Manuva – Witness (1 hope)
- Saliva – Click Click Boom (actually a pretty fun song even now. Every Six Seconds album closer My Goodbyes was rather wrenching)
- Saves the Day – At Your Funeral
- Slayer – Disciple
- Slipknot – I Am Hated
- Son of Sam – Of Power
- Staind – It’s Been Awhile
- System of a Down – Toxicity
- The Appleseed Cast – Strings
- The White Stripes – Fell in Love with a Girl
- Thursday – Paris in Flames
- Tiger Army – In the Orchard
- Tomahawk – Sir Yes Sir
- Tool – Schism
- Will Haven – Carpe Diem
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