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

020: The Books
The Lemon of Pink
[Tomlab; 2003]

The Books' brand of sound collage-- pristine violin squeals, weird vocal samples, chopped-up organics, and plenty of silence-- manages to scramble classic Americana into something entirely unfamiliar. The Lemon of Pink has plenty of banjo, but no beard: Despite all those scratchy strings, the Books never dip into folk structure (or folk cliché), opting instead to twist all those disparate bits into a glitchy, throbbing, and beautiful whole. Unsurprisingly, The Lemon of Pink can seem strange and familiar all at once-- not unlike tumbling down a rabbit hole, arms flailing, skirt flying high, mouth half-open, eyes wide, slowly taking in all the swirling, oddly delicious distortions... and thinking that you must be in for quite an adventure. --Amanda Petrusich

019: Ghostface Killah
Supreme Clientele
[Sony; 2001]

Unless your name ended in RZA or GZA, working outside of the 36 chambers seemed like a risky move. As it happened, there were no worries for hip-hop's Mushmouth: From a man seemingly at war with grammar, Ghostface's Supreme Clientele was an astoundingly cohesive and profound endeavor. To be honest, I understand Toney about 40% of the time, and anyone claiming to do better can kiss my mulatto ass. When he drops shit like, "Supercalifragalisticexpialidocious/ Dociousaliexpifragalisticcalisuper/ Cancun, catch me in the room, eatin' grouper" on "Buck 50", it infuriates my fine-tuned sense of justice. It's not fair, I always think, he's just mashing words together! Ghostface's verses are so absurd and flow with such meticulous ease, you can't help but feel like the man is teasing you, drawing you into livid comprehension before kicking you in the balls. And your balls are humongous, dude. "Yo this rap is like ziti," he says. Absolutely... --Jamin Warren

018: Devendra Banhart
Rejoicing in the Hands
[Young God; 2004]

Once upon a time there was a brilliant young man who was written off by his foes as a freak or a joke because he didn't sing in a way that scanned with his particular era and gender and age bracket; but his supposed "weirdness" was in fact a function of just how narrow the pop marketplace's listening habits had become. What they saw as only an air of outsider innocence or a defensive shield was actually a clever, deeply artful approach to music-making; it was precisely because he knew a good deal about what he was doing and its place in the history of popular music that each tremor of his voice and strum of his fingers seemed to telescope further and further backwards into the past even as its archly constructed feints and bluffs held fast to the present moment. People found that if they let go a bit and got over the initial shock of that voice that, in fact, the dots got connected. It liberated them and gave them joy to hear this voice singing and follow these nimble fingers as they played.

Question: Who was this man?

A. Tiny Tim
B. Marc Bolan
C. Bob Dylan
D. Devendra Banhart
E. All of the above.

Answers in the form of a fine-lined drawing on parchment please. --Drew Daniel

017: Boredoms
Vision Creation Newsun
[Birdman; 2001]

For all their ornery outbursts and short-attention-span splatter, somehow it's not surprising that Japan's Boredoms could create something of such sprawling, perfect beauty. It's not that it's soothing or even "pretty"; rather, its wildness and abandon bring out the crystalline allure embedded in its "songs." It's as if all the great trance practitioners of the last half century-- Ravi Shankar, Philip Glass, Terry Riley, Can, Hawkwind-- got together for one last jam session to round out the millennium. But then, I mostly remember afternoons spent driving home, under the sun, staring at the traffic ahead, and lost in a trance to kinetic little songs with symbols for names. They might as well have been hieroglyphics, and Boredoms may as well have been those aliens who were supposed to have taught the Egyptians and South American Indians how to build pyramids. The trick is: just keep going up. --Dominique Leone

016: The Strokes
Is This It
[RCA; 2001]

Hype comes and goes. For puffed-up bands like the Strokes, it's less a matter of living up to rash, unreasonable expectations than outliving them. Eventually, the ballyhoo dies and the detractors stop caring, but ask yourself: Was it the band you were sick of or the 40-foot paparazzi boner than followed them everywhere?

Is This It? is a classic. Plenty of low-slung Manhattanites kicked out Velvet-rooted jams in Prada boots before the Strokes, but if "Last Nite" was mere stage-as-runway fluff, I guarantee the magazine rack at Barnes & Noble would look much different today. Tinged with self-effacement and more than a little earnest brainpower, songs like "The Modern Age" and "Hard to Explain" took on an uncanny melancholic glow in late 2001. Amidst a morass of mourning and mongering, the Strokes remained refreshingly sleek and straightforward. Luckily, the Strokes neither took themselves too seriously nor lacked the goods to back up the whirlwind press storm. In the months after 9/11, we couldn't pop soma, but "Soma" was our incidental remedy, and its feel-good glow hasn't fizzled a wink. --Sam Ubl

015: Dizzee Rascal
Boy in Da Corner
[XL; 2003]

Is Dizzee in the corner because he's being disciplined, because he's deep in contemplation, or because he's gearing up for a fight? You could make a case for any of those situations being central to Boy In Da Corner. Set against the backdrop of his frosty, industrial productions, he gulps out a portrait of life in lower-class East London that resounds with urgency, anxiety, and hope.

In Dizzee's warzone, you have to stay slippery, keep moving at all times, and avoid getting pinned by anything-- gunfire, drugs, girls, even friends. That means staying hard, and yet at the same time, he's not afraid to let us in on his sadness either. It's between those two extremes-- the barbed-wire ferocity of something like "Jus' a Rascal" (check the last verse) and the softened determination of "Do It"-- that Dizzee builds one of the richest and most interesting character studies of the decade so far. Grime's first big record is still its best, and there's no reason to think that's going to change anytime soon. --Mark Pytlik

014: Spoon
Kill the Moonlight
[Merge; 2002]

In my mind, Spoon songs on Kill the Moonlight are like games of Jenga-- Britt Daniel seemingly starts with a completed, fully functioning song, and then goes about removing bits and pieces to see how much he can slot out while still maintaining structural integrity. "Small Stakes" stands tall with little more than a few small bits of percussion, some organ notes, and approximately 8.6 seconds of guitar feedback. "Stay Don't Go" gets by with even less-- some rhythm guitar, a little lead, intermittent sound effects, three piano chords, and beatboxing. (In this light, I expect future songs to be MacGuyverian models of ingenuity, consisting of one rubber band, some nail clippings, and a wad of chewing gum.)

This doesn't mean Spoon has foregone writing more traditionally arranged songs-- indeed, this utilitarian want-not approach benefits the more, um, "indulgent" efforts. Tracks like "Jonathon Fisk" and "The Way We Get By" deploy their musical sorties with alacrity and efficiency, no motion wasted or unnecessary. Not bad for a group that used to crib moves wholesale from Black Francis' fakebooks-- nowadays, it's the moves they don't make that matter more. --David Raposa

013: Madvillain
Madvillainy
[Stones Throw; 2004]

The people thought their meeting was a myth and a rumor, a convergence so desired it had been wished into the consciousness. MF Doom. Madlib. Would the masked, metal-fingered verbalist join forces with the man who magicked the samples to refabric time? We sat on our hopes for months and years; finally, it came to pass-- Madvillainy-- could it be true?

Together, as the story ("The Illest Villains") goes, the fellows were "the personification of carnage... more accurately, the dark side of our beings." Behind a smoky veil of herbalism, the fearless duo navigated the sublime-- patching down basslines, pieces of woozy orchestra, ladies shrieking-- and laminating aural pictorials like one might splice together frames of film. (Or rather, their methods created the effect of experimental cinema, like the photo-pastiche of Jonas Mekas, which is not to say it's more legitimate or that one follows the other-- listen, have you read Jonathan Lethem's Fortress of Solitude, about the confluence of hip-hop, film, and comics? That is this album.)

While Madlib's special power played tricks on your ears-- a sample you were sure was the sound of cars rolling by on the street might sound like the hiss of a record on a different day ("Rainbows")-- Doom unfurled his clever lyrics like a roll of sod on earth... and the album curved in on itself like a two-way mirror. As Doom promised on "Strange Ways": "When the smoke clear, you can see the sky again/ There will be the chopped off heads of leviathan." --Julianne Shepherd

012: Daft Punk
Discovery
[Virgin; 2001]

What do you think Guy-Manuel and Thomas did in the studio when they listened back to the ridiculoid moments of total genius strung across this album-- moments such as, say, the vocoder breakdown in "Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger"? Did they high-five? Did they do a backspin on the floor in celebration of making the tuffest, most disgustingly ill breakdown ever? Did they even know how many people were going to smile until their face hurt when they heard this shit for the first time? Did they consider the spine and neck injuries this funk could cause? Could they already hear drunken, loved-up crowds singing, "Why don't you play the gaaaaaaaamme," in hoarse football hooligan voices back at them, European vowels and all? Did they groan inwardly at the snooty comments about resurrecting ELO, the Buggles, 10cc, and Zapp that their eerily glossy pop masterpiece was going to occasion from rockist yahoos? Were they haunted by a fear that the first half of their album was so spine-tingling that people were just going to rewind it and play it over and over instead of riding this ride out to the finish? Are Daft Punk even human, or is this "ha ha I'm a fake robot wait no I'm not" shtick concealing something far more sinister? An interstellar conspiracy, perhaps? --Drew Daniel

011: Wilco
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
[Nonesuch; 2002]

Hey, remember when Yankee Hotel Foxtrot changed the world? When the album went ten times platinum, when Warner Bros. dissolved its music division out of embarrassment, when Jeff Tweedy became the voice of a generation? Okay, so none of that really happened, and all the instant mythologies and extramusical meaningfulness attached to YHF upon its release maybe caused it to burn a little too bright too fast. But now, as all that nonsense flakes away, we can appreciate the album for what it really is: a wildly successful crack at mild ambition for a band that could have made a comfortable living doing Woody