[Singles: 100-051]
[Singles: 050-001]
[Albums: 100-051]
[Albums: 050-001]

030: Clinic
Internal Wrangler
[Domino; 2001]

What is an internal wrangler? I imagine it as a sort of cowboy of the psyche, Freud in boots with a gunbelt and 10-gallon hat sweeping into Cerebellum Town to do epic battle with the corrupt sheriff of our hang-ups and his deputies, our inner demons. Clinic came at it from a different angle, of course, defining it as a dark punk explosion of garbled syntax and paranoia shot through with waves of surf guitar, creepy melodica and song shards that mostly clocked in under three minutes long. Ade Blackburn's clench-teethed moan was capable of surprising range, even tenderness, grounding the scattershot tracklist with haunting ballads like "Goodnight Georgie" and "Distortions". But psychosis is the meat of the album, and it comes tossing the word salad every which way on blistering freakouts "The Return of Evil Bill", "Internal Wrangler", and "The Second Line", where words degenerate into gibberish heaps of syllables, and you wind up helplessly singing along to a guy who's saying "diggie diggie de momo no" while intravenous guitars bore into the core of your being. The Ornette Coleman-referencing cover art is oddly apropos; like Coleman, Clinic plays so freely with expectations on Internal Wrangler that they obliterate them, mixing traditional elements into something entirely new and exciting. --Joe Tangari

029: Fugazi
The Argument
[Dischord; 2001]

In 2002, I saw Fugazi from the bleachers of a gymnasium at Massachusetts College of Art in Boston while a couple thousand kids pogoed on the basketball courts, and the temperature in the room must have risen about 15 degrees over the course of the band's amazing, career-spanning set. Fugazi's most mythologized days may be the ones they spent burning up tiny rooms in DC, creating a DIY empire that crowned them kings of the underground, but they've never sounded better as a band than they did on The Argument. "Cashout" is a cogent, passionate lament for people displaced by eminent domain, "Full Disclosure" swings between maniacal screaming and melodic choruses filled with harmony vocals, "The Kill" is Fugazi's spookiest song, and "Nightshop" is an unstoppable raging bull in the China shop of overdevelopment and commercialization, featuring two drummers and a jaw-dropping acoustic guitar break. Fugazi are often thought of as little more than elder statesmen, but on The Argument they proved that they could play with the kids and win every time. --Joe Tangari

028: Liars
They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top
[Mute; 2002]

Remember, how you say, "dancepunk"? That was cute, huh? Gawd! We're so over that, right? Dancepunk is dead! Long-live freakfolk! But when Joanna Newsom is making your pets break their own necks to enjoy the sweet escape of death, Liars will be right where you left them-- as angry, nervous, and corrosive as ever, which is to say, very. Jittery funk beats set the listener up like soft hypnosis, guitars rake like claws, and Angus Andrews drinks glass after glass of battery acid, all for the audience's wonderment; forty minutes of raw tension and one mind-warping locked groove add up to, in hindsight, the unassailable, oddly transient, zenith of dance-punk. People wonder why they abandoned Trench's sound after a single album-- it's 'cause they got it right the first time. Remember Gang of Four? Yeah, me neither. Just listen to "Mr. You're on Fire Mr." and enjoy yourself. --Eric Carr

027: Broken Social Scene
You Forgot It in People
[Arts & Crafts; 2002]

Broken Social Scene is one of seemingly thousands of bands comprised of the revolving cast of characters from Canada's thriving art-rock circles; its double-digit lineup contains members of Stars, Do Make Say Think, Metric, and A Silver Mount Zion, just to name a few. Their grand sophomore album, You Forgot It in People, blends the scene's more adventurous tenets with the sugary pop confections of Stars and locates a perfect equilibrium between melodic accessibility and vigorously inventive songwriting. With its powerful melodies, breathy indie-dude vocals, expert playing, and sharp musical contrasts (as incandescent, shoegazing guitar figures sear crisp glyphs onto billowy, diaphanous backgrounds), You Forgot It in People rejuvenates worn-out indie rock by injecting it with an enthusiasm, vitality ,and technical facility it seldom enjoys. It's a furiously thrumming, spangled machine that never holds still, seesawing between instrumental and vocal tracks with a seamless continuity. Its exuberant spirit reminds you that it's the product of good friends just jamming out together; its mind-blowing chops remind you that the motherfuckers can play. A clattering, coasting, soaring, rambunctious space rock concoction. --Brian Howe

026: Fennesz
Endless Summer
[Mego; 2001]

From Tintern Abbey to Berlin's Kaiser Wilhelm Gedachtniskirche, Romantic sublimity finds its architectural epitome in the muted violence of the picturesque ruin; formal fragmentation imposes limits upon our access to an implied totality which struggles, we feel, to speak to us in the face of loss. With Endless Summer, Fennesz managed to transpose this dynamic into musical terms, fashioning a brilliantly seductive mirage by subjecting his instrumental performances to merciless blasts of digital signal processing, aliasing artifacts, clipped edits, and gnarled, ashen EQ. I have no idea whether or not a great lost album of sunshine guitar pop actually lies mummified beneath the gauzey layers of file-frottage, but as with the hallucinations induced by Psychocandy and Loveless, I feel that it is there. The endurance of this album lies neither in the swoony tune-writing abilities of its creator nor in the precision of his textures, but in the way that both already substantial elements have been made to reinforce each other. Perversely, the guitar's pathos expands immeasurably precisely because of the intrusive, prosthetic interference of the laptop. Many folly gardens have been subsequently built in imitation, but this ruin still stands above them all. --Drew Daniel

025: Brian Wilson
Smile
[Nonesuch; 2004]

Perhaps the best way to appreciate the triumph of Brian Wilson's newly completed Smile is to first consider what an utter catastrophe the restoration could've been. If Wilson and his collaborators, Van Dyke Parks and Darian Sahanaja, had mangled the Beach Boys' lost masterpiece (which, considering Wilson's always fragile psychological state, was a distinct possibility) the resulting disappointment would've dwarfed that which met such ill-guided creative resurrections as The Phantom Menace or the Beatles' "Free As a Bird". In this sense, there was no riskier musical project undertaken in the past half-decade, and thankfully we can now say that Wilson's courage has paid off in spades. Though undoubtedly not the same Smile the world would've received had it been completed back in the 60s, this record remains a staggering achievement. A surreal, frequently sublime journey through the lifespan of the American landscape and songbook, it might not be everything that Beach Boy fans have always dreamed of, but that it so resoundingly surpasses what most of us ever thought we'd get to hear is little short of miraculous. --Matthew Murphy

024: Boards of Canada
Geogaddi
[Warp; 2002]

Unfairly maligned at the time of its release for not deviating enough from BoC's landmark Music Has the Right to Children, in retrospect, Geogaddi registers as more tightly packed, even darker. It crackles and glows in a way that its predecessor rarely does, and leaves the impression that it was originally 130 minutes of music that's been somehow melted down into 65. As with nearly everything Boards make, there's a deep sense of black magic and mystery at work here-- from the presence of obscure geographical placeholders ("The Beach at Redpoint") to their abiding fascination with science and numerology ("The Smallest Weird Number") to veiled references to David Koresh and Charles Manson ("1969"), Geogaddi's content is as dense and as mysterious as its sounds. It's a straight-edge alternative to huffing angel dust and strapping flaming seashells to your ears. --Mark Pytlik

023: The Notwist
Neon Golden
[Domino; 2003]

After more than a decade of experimentation, Germany's the Notwist landed as if by accident on a seamless blend of computerized beats and guitar-pop. Just don't make the mistake of calling the former "cold" or the latter "warm"-- Neon Golden's textured electronics are every bit as organic as its banjos and saxophones, bringing high-tech down to Earth even better than the bear market. Markus Acher's tranquil voice speaks to this album's humanity even as his ESL lyrics ("You'll no longer be kissed and kind" on "One With the Freaks") cast the language in an alien light. "Pilot" pulsates with near-perfect dance-pop about desperation and escape. By the finale, "Consequence", the Notwist melt hearts when Acher repeatedly coos, "Never leave me paralyzed, love." Lap-pop is nearly as common now as garage rock was when this record was released, but rarely have both sides of the hyphen carried on so naturally. --Marc Hogan

022: The Microphones
The Glow, Pt. 2
[K Records; 2001]

Sewing sunspots onto rickety piano and sheets of pine-box distortion, The Glow Pt. 2 establishes an epic crackle/pop early and maintains its understated, sometimes explosive sense of space and dynamics until the end of track twenty. From joyous trumpets, overdriven drums, and tree-hugger incantations to those patented whispery body-electric epiphanies ("I'm alone except for the sound of insects flying around/ They know my red blood is warm still"), these Northwestern charms are as perfectly paced, ordered, and delivered as the scruffy acoustic elegance of Sebadoh's early masterpiece, III. Defining moments abound, but for starters pay attention to the acoustic jangle/Neutral Milk Hotel/crunk transition of "I Want Wind To Blow" and the lapidary title track. All considered-- and there's a lot to consider here-- it's no surprise Elvrum has yet to top what sounds like Emerson and Thoreau turning Nature and Walden into transcendental indie rock. --Brandon Stosuy

021: Radiohead
Amnesiac
[Capitol; 2001]

On what may be Radiohead's classiest and most restrained collection of songs, Thom Yorke ran endurance tests on his repertoire, having cast himself in a guitarless role that might be billed as a fight between his piano man, his personal jesus, and his paranoid android. Oddly pretty, the album's cynical showtunes slithered through pop history, flinched with futurism, drank dyspepsia, chewed troublegum, shriveled Big Brother, and inflated Chicken Little. Amnesiac crouched in its own deprivation chamber so elegantly that its initial misdiagnosis of being "10 songs in search of an album" would be forgotten if not for the reprise of Kid A's "Morning Bell". But even that echo was recast from a warm distant place, like a clone baby singing itself to sleep in a makeshift womb, its lullabies dreading much more than prequel-envy. --William Bowers