See “Best of 2008” for a general introduction.
A funny year this one. There are
a couple of classic debuts and instances of artists’ best work, but otherwise
it’s a case of solid albums by great artists whose Magnum Opuses were from
other times. Of course this is, as usual, a matter of preference. For many
people, Killswitch Engage’s Alive or Just Breathing, Korn’s Untouchables, or
ISIS’s Oceanic are those bands’ best records.
Some classic albums from the year
that I haven’t chosen to comment on more fully include Coldplay’s A Rush of
Blood to the Head (their best album, I think), Damien Rice’s O (I recall this
was everywhere at the time but it doesn’t seem to feature in that many
retrospective best-ofs), And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead’s Source
Tags and Codes, Coheed and Cambria’s Second Stage Turbine Blade, Finch’s What
it is to Burn, The Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, GZA's Legend
of the Liquid Sword, Hundred Reasons’ Ideas Above Our Station, The Coral s/t,
The Roots’ Phrenology.
This was the year of Queens of
the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf, but while I think it has a great concept
(this sort of desert radio saga) and Dave Grohl drumming, it’s only ever been
the classic singles No-one Knows and Go with the Flow that have stuck with
me. Red Hot Chili Peppers’ By the Way had some of their best ever songs (the
title track, Venice Queen, Can’t Stop) but it is also a little bit low-key a
lot of the time (I think this is deliberate – the record is to sad what the
earlier records are to sex and partying, and this is certainly mirrored in the
album artwork – but, still) and it’s certainly four or five tracks too long.
Fortune Faded, which featured in the subsequent greatest hits package, and is a
pretty fantastic song, was a product of the By the Way recording sessions.
Phil Anselmo’s DOWN supergroup
(more than just a side project to Pantera) released their second album, DOWN
II: A Bustle in Your Hedgerow, but while I like it well enough I don’t think
it’s really a patch on the first record, and it’s not even my favourite Anselmo
record from that year, that being Superjoint Ritual’s Use Once and Destroy. I
need to write about Anselmo more at some point, given his controversial nature
yet, like Chino Moreno, he’s one of those people where most things they touch
turn to gold.
Well anyway, all of these
musicians are represented in the playlist, so now I’ll just comment on some of
my favourite enduring 2002 albums.
36 Crazyfists – Bitterness the Star
Like Ill Nino, I came across
these guys via a song on a Kerrang! magazine compilation CD (remember those?).
Listening to Brock Lindow’s vibrating voice for the first time was one of those
experiences you never get back (others include Maynard James Keenan, obviously,
and Zara McFarlane). He really doesn’t sound like anyone else, not that I’ve
noticed for years, and while I often thought he served to elevate a less
interesting band (like, say, Lacuna Coil), a little more careful listening
reveals this not to be the case, with solid musicianship all-round, not least
some superlative and inventive drumming. It’s more alternative metal /
metalcore / hardcore than nu-metal, I think, but given its time it nevertheless
attracted that label. Similarly to the plethora of bands from Umea, Sweden,
this started a sort of fetish of mine for cold, wintry climes, in this case
Alaska.
Audioslave – Audioslave
Another super-group, if you will,
featuring everyone from Rage Against the Machine not called Zack, with
Soundgarden’s Chris Cornell (RIP) on vocals. To be fair, that is where the innovation
begins and ends but the album has more than its fair share of bangers. I never
really liked the other two albums they did, so I guess lightning didn’t
strike more than once with them.
DJ Shadow – The Private Press
In reminding myself of albums
that came out in each of these historical years, I’ve been googling “best of
yyyy” with or without specific magazine names as suffixes. Sites like Spin and
Pitchfork included. But I have to be wary of those – anything that’s
contemporarily ‘cool’ will get raved about, with most ‘alternative’ music
ignored or low scored. Now while DJ Shadow’s second album proper did get a 7.0
out of 10, which isn’t a bad score, it was called out as being far inferior to
RJD2’s release of the same year. Maybe that’s not false but it certainly didn’t
need to be said. Also, the opening paragraph to Pitchfork’s top 50 albums of
2002 states “The more we look back on it, 2001 sucked.” As you’ll see from my
next instalment of these exciting blog posts, you don’t have to look too far
outside of the mainstream to see what bullcrap that statement is.
Well anyway, I think the Private
Press is a more than worthy follow-up to Josh Davis’ 1996 masterpiece
Entroducing. I don’t see it as that far of a departure, actually. If anything
it is the more focused of the two. And it certainly doesn’t feature Chris
Martin clones or the worst that gangsta rap has to offer like 2006’s The
Outsider does. Davis has referred to non-Entroducing records by asking fans to
decide whether they are fans of the artist or the album but with my oft-cited
benefit of coming late to the party, it is unfathomable to me how people didn’t
adore this record. When you haven’t got a human performance, the emotion has to
come from the tunes themselves, the beats, the layering, the timing, the
choices made by the producer, and I can’t fault the Private Press on any of
these. In the “…on the Motorway” brace of tracks we have a gorgeous epic that
is the equal of Stem/Long Stem. And that’s saying something.
Glassjaw – Worship and Tribute
While the New York post-hardcore
outfit’s recorded output doubled in the period 2006-2011, their fervent fan-base
was built solely around the two records released in 2000 and 20002. And given
how little they play live from Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About
Silence, one might deduce it was really only based on Worship and Tribute.
Given how stunning it is (and far better produced and less misogynistic than
the debut) that’s hardly surprising. It is brutally heavy (Tip Your Bartender),
emotional (Ape Dos Mil), off-kilter (The Gillette Cavalcade of Sports), and
political (Radio Cambodia). A piece of work upon which legacies are made,
indeed.
Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Yanqui U.X.O
This is the Canadian post-rock
behemoth’s least distinct record, and might rank at the bottom of fans’
favourite lists, but it is still an absolute and uncompromising beauty of an
album. Most bands should be so lucky to have a worst album as good as this.
ISIS – Oceanic
I’ve said already that I prefer
Panopticon, but not by much! Oceanic is perhaps objectively the better record,
and historically more important to the post-metal genre given it came earlier.
Korn – Untouchables
I think by the time I became a
Korn fan Issues was already out (or close to it), so this was the first new
Korn album for me. It had an incredible hype train anyway, and reportedly cost
$3m to make, most of which isn’t apparent. Korn can be slick and professional,
but as unfairly derided by serious musos as they are, they perhaps do not
really benefit from the type of super exposed production this album features. This is by no means a
perfect (Korn) record, and the tracks Beat it Upright and Wake Up Hate have no
right existing, let alone not being left on the cutting room floor, but Here to Stay is
certainly one of their greatest singles, electric-tinged ballad Alone I Break
is an entirely successful experiment, Hating is a haunting semi-epic deep cut,
and the past-referencing Hollow Life is really rather clever.
Lacuna Coil – Comalies
I’m not sure the portmanteau of
“coma” and “lies” reads as well in native English as it does in second language
English, but no matter. (I sure as eggs are eggs couldn’t come up with a cool
record title in Italian!) I think this is the purist choice of best work for
fans of the mid-tempo dual-vocal goth-rock band, vs, say, Karmacode for more
metal-leaning listeners. At any rate, it is home to some of the band’s biggest
hits (Heaven’s A Lie, and Swamped, both of which work beautifully as acoustic
versions), some of the best melodies and most affecting harmonies they ever
wrote, and with things like the drum breaks in Tight Rope, we actually have
some interesting music that serves as more than just backing for Cristina
(Scabbia, one of my favourite singers ever, as I may have mentioned once or
twice before). I think it was the Easter holidays in 2007 when I was finishing
my fourth year dissertation to a Lacuna Coil soundtrack.
Opeth – Deliverance
The heavy counterpart to 2003’s
light-only Damnation, from the Swedish genre-defying jazz-death-metallers. I
have seen it written that, by contrast, it features some of the heaviest
material mastermind Mikael Akerfeldt ever wrote, but there’s only so heavy it
can be with Steven Wilson (Porcupine Tree) producing. Average song length over 10 minutes, mind.
Pearl Jam – Riot Act
Perhaps controversially, especially
where records like Vs and Vitalogy are concerned, I think Pearl Jam are far
more of a singles than an album band. Ten is probably an exception to that, but
Riot Act certainly is. It stays mostly in a low gear throughout, and is more
blues than rock a lot of the time, but I think it is an incredibly even piece
of work. Nice bit of anti-Bush politics in there too.
Raised Fist – Dedication
2019’s Anthems is one of the most horrible albums I have ever heard. I shouldn’t have been too surprised, as the output of the Swedish hardcore punks has been patchy ever since this third album of theirs. Another record with a lot of nostalgia points, I came to this at a time I was dipping my toes into things like AFI and Sick of it All (as well as Korn, Slipknot, and Metallica – this was a time when punks and metallers couldn’t be friends, for some reason). (Thanks Dan, if you’re reading.)
I believe it was
the first CD I played on a new hi-fi (remember those?) I got for Christmas.
Mostly brutal and heavy, an album highlight is the clean instrumental passage
that repeats in Another Day. The vocal phrasing and delivery is up there with
Davey Havok and Jacob Bannon at their best, and even the lyrics largely avoid
cringe (again, I may well be doing disservice to the first/second language
barrier).
Sigur Ros - ( )
This is not the first instance of this in
this list, but this is absolutely the Iceland post-rock magicians’ finest work
(Ágætis byrjun is but a close second, IMO). The mesmerising closing epic
Untitled 8 (dat drumming!) is worth the price of admission by itself (judging
by its live performances, they know it, too) but the album is home to much more
than that, with the iconic use of the made-up ‘Hopelandic’ language (to me the
phrases sound like “I sat alone” and “you suck”), the two halves of “light and
optimistic” and “more melancholic” (thanks Wikipedia) separated by 36 seconds
of silence intended to mimic the turning over of a vinyl record.
Stone Sour – s/t
Arguably Corey Taylor’s ‘other
band’ (although I think they actually predate Slipknot)’s best record, it is
certainly the heaviest (read: most like Slipknot) and most singular. After this they
crept closer and closer to middle of the road Foo Fighters rock.
The Cinematic Orchestra – Every Day
Jason Swinscoe’s
electronic-tinged nu-jazz collective’s finest hour. While it is stunning
throughout, and plenty of the other tracks are live staples, it is really the
centrepiece of the record formed by the 20 minute pairing of Man with the Movie
Camera (one of the most sublime pieces of music ever recorded, itself the
centre of 2003’s soundtrack to the silent film of the same name) and the Roots
Manuva featuring All Things to All Men that elevates this album from mere
recording to out of body experience.
The Used – s/t
The eponymous Utah band could easily
have been a flash in the pan, but this is the sort of record that was played in
its entirety at its own show years later. They got too emo and whiny for me
later on, and while 2004’s In Love and Death had some incredible highs, it was
horribly uneven. But the debut was an incredibly consistent and often witty
(choice lyric, “if you want me back, you’re gonna have to ask”) slice of
post-hardcore/screamo. And despite the dark themes and my general lack of
desire for this, it was actually rather fun too.
A playlist
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/3hzltuqlsfwMSy8eWg6wEe?si=rLDe5K-fR3aVV9hPuWDeOQ
- 36 Crazyfists – Slit Wrist Theory
- A – Nothing
- Audioslave – Like a Stone
- AYWKUBTTOD – Another Morning Stoner
- Biffy Clyro – Joy.Discovery.Invention
- Boards of Canada – Smokes Quantity
- Coheed and Cambria – Time Consumer
- Coldplay – God Put a Smile Upon Your Face
- Damien Rice – The Blower’s Daughter
- David Bowie – Sunday
- DJ Shadow – Fixed Income
- Down – New Orleans is a Dying Whore
- Dream Theater – The Great Debate
- Finch – Grey Matter
- Flaming Lips – Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt.1
- Foo Fighters – All my Life
- Glassjaw – Radio Cambodia
- Godspeed You! Black Emperor – Rockets Fall on Rocket Falls
- GZA – Knock, Knock
- Hundred Reasons – I’ll Find You
- In Flames – Trigger
- ISIS – False Light
- Jay Z – 03 Bonnie & Clyde
- Killswitch Engage – My Last Serenade
- Korn – Alone I Break
- Lacuna Coil – Swamped
- Meshuggah – Rational Gaze
- Moby – Extreme Ways
- Murderdolls – Dead in Hollywood
- Opeth – Wreath
- Pearl Jam – Save You
- Queens of the Stone Age – Go With the Flow
- Raised Fist – Another Day
- Red Hot Chili Peppers – Venice Queen
- RJD2 – Smoke & Mirrors
- Saliva – Separated Self
- Sigur Ros – Untitled 8
- Soulfly – Seek ‘N’ Strike
- Stone Sour – Monolith
- The Cinematic Orchestra (feat. Roots Manuva) – All Things to All Men
- The Coral – Dreaming of You
- The Roots – The Seed (2.0)
- The Used – Maybe Memories
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