Let it buckle, let it bend

Here are albums that I came close to including but who couldn't quite make the cut for some reason or other. Suffice to say, if none of the albums I've been talking about over the last month existed, this would be the top ten (although in what order I'm not quite sure).

I feel like there's little more I can say in praise of this album. I've spent virtually the entire time since its release two years ago singing its praises. Neon Bible is the album of the decade that stands effortlessly head and shoulders above everything else that's been done musically - and given the company it keeps in the top half of this list, that's high praise indeed. I'm going to try to stay away from hyperbole or lame pseudo-Prindle-esque humour and just stick with the facts. What is this album? Why is it so good?

It's epic. Yes, I'm aware that this is a word that's terribly over-used and under-whelming, particularly when talking about music. I try to use it sparingly, so the fact that I am using it here should really tell you something. To deconstruct the concept a bit, Neon Bible tells a story - not a fairly simple Pete Townsend-style 'once there was a guy who did this and that and the other' style story. This is more of a sense of progression from song to song, a slowly building emotional weight that doesn't actually depict one event after another - the lyrics are all quite vague and focus more on feelings and thoughts than actual, y'know, happenings. But when it reaches its climax it's like a massive wave breaking over you.

It's timely. Arcade Fire's previous album, Funeral (also a very, very good album) was all about coming to terms with personal loss and loneliness (hence the title). Funeral went some fairly dark places, but it ended on a modestly upbeat note - it's as if the album took us on a tour of a cemetary containing the graves of many deceased friends, and, after feeling appropriately sad and placing metaphorical flowers at their graves, we emerged, somber and reflective, but calm and perhaps even hopeful. Unfortunately, with Neon Bible, we emerge from that cemetary to find that, as we were making our peace with ourselves and our past, the world's gone completely, maddeningly insane. If you can remember the feeling you had when you first saw the airliner smashing into the World Trade Centre, it's kind of like that feeling, but it goes on and on and on. In a way the transition between Funeral and Neon Bible is the transition most intelligent people go through - from dealing with personal issues to dealing with a world that treats us like a bulldozer treats a christmas ornament.

It's ruthlessly proficient. The are very few albums where I could honestly say there is not a single drop of filler infiltrating them - Franz Ferdinand is almost one, Nevermind is one, Unknown Pleasures is one, and perhaps a couple (by no means all) of Beatles and Who albums also qualify. Neon Bible joins this august club. Whether the band were just totally on fire when they recorded it or were ruthlessly efficient at tearing out everything that didn't meet the highest standard of musical quality, I'm not sure, but there's really not a single second from start to finish where one isn't engaged, absorbed and finding new things to wonder at. The guitars are buzzing, the drumming disciplined and yet not without flair, and the vocals are in that perfect sweet spot where they are emotive without being jarring. In a risky move that seems to scream 'sophomore slump' but effectively does the opposite, the band have brought in several choral groups (including, amusingly, a Hungarian military choir) but the backing vocals, rather than descending into pretentiousness, merge seamlessly with the wafting orchestral backgrounds.

I've been listening to this album nigh continously since it came out, even though it can sometimes be difficult - anybody who doesn't find at least one song that hits a bit close to the bone in terms of their personal demons has had a fucking easy life (for me, it's 'Ocean of Noise'). But really, if the worst thing you can say about an album is that it's too emotionally evocative, well, that's game, set and match as far as I'm concerned.

Similar and almost as good: The Shins 'Wincing the Night Away', Modest Mouse 'We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank'
Similar and not as good: The Handsome Family, 'Honey Moon'

Bloc Party were a slow burn for me. It didn't help that I misheard their name, when somebody first felt the need to enlighten me of their existence, as 'Block Party', and immediately wrote them off as some unoriginal American hip-hop act. I continued in this misapprehension for days, weeks, months, years, until somebody told me that, hey, these guys are from Reading, so I immediately granted them a mental promotion to unoriginal British hip-hop act. This has been the basic pattern of my relationship with Bloc Party - an admiration that continually grows the more and more I engage with them. Right now I'm describing them as the 'nineties Radiohead'.

Why are these guys so good? Well let's start at the beginning - by which I mean, the first track on this album. It's called 'Song For Clay / Disappear' and, if I were ranking the top ten songs of the decade, it would unquestionably be in at #1. It's a paranoic, sharp, vividly sketched musical portrait of twenty-something urban life. While the album is full of visual and thematic references to London, the song could be anywhere - it's in part an homeage to Bret Easton Ellis' Less than Zero and it could certainly be about Los Angeles - and I suspect New York, Paris, Berlin, Sydney or even little ol' Auckland or Wellington. The song is energetic, hooky - I'd even go so far as to say catchy, which is usually a back-handed compliment for me - and moves at a relentless pace. And the lyrics? Wow, those are some clever lyrics. It's relentlessly quotable - lines like 'Live the dream like the eighties never happened' just beg to show up on a T-shirt (and for all I know already have).

If this entire album was just that single song it might well get onto the top ten, but why stop at a single awesome song when you have the ability to write a whole bunch of other awesome songs? The other main musical reference point on this album would have to be 'Hunting for Witches', which makes overt everything that 'Song for Clay' subtly alludes to, with explicit references to anti-immigrant hate campaigns and the 7/7 bombings. It's the most nakedly political song on the album but politics informs almost everything that goes on here. Songs such as 'Uniform', 'SRXT' and 'Where is Home' all basically highlight different points of the same story - a story of urban alienation in a culture that seems obsessed with fear. There's even a call to action embedded in tracks like 'I Still Remember', although it's less an endorsement of open rebellion than personal integrity. I can only imagine that Bloc Party's members must be fairly intensely unhappy young men to write this kind of thing, but growing up non-heterosexual and of mixed ethnicity in modern Britain, hell, who could blame them?

If it was the year 2099 and I was teaching a university course about early 21st century history I could do a lot worse than giving all my students a copy of this album and getting them to listen to it. And you know what? It'd probably be better, musically, than any of the crap kids would be listening to at that stage.

Similar and almost as good: Cat Power, 'You Are Free', Muse, 'Absolution'
Similar and not as good: The Long Blondes 'Couples'

Every now and then a band will come along that sounds way better than they actually are. I mean, what kind of bizarre world are we living in where taking annoying rap-style vocals and politically pretentious lyrics out of Rage against the Machine and replacing them with the proven vocal chops of none other than Chris motherfucking Cornell results in Audioslave, as opposed to a band that's worth following past their initial music video? So, you can understand my reluctance, when somebody told me about this bunch of Glaswegian lads. Yes, it's a testimony to how badly the music industry has treated me that, when somebody says 'Hey, they're a bunch of art school drop outs inspired by 1920s-era Soviet photo-realist art who are named after a dead Austrian archduke', my first thought is that it sounds like a band designed specifically for me, and that therefore they must blow.

So I went along in my happy ignorance, listening to Joy Division and The Clash as I usually do until - and this very, very rarely happens to me - I happened to be in a music store at a time when the spikey guitars, jangly bass, breathy vocals and wispy Clean-style drumming of 'Take Me Out' was being played. So I enquired of the clerk, 'who is this?', and was told that it was in fact none other than that band I'd heard about earlier named after a dead guy who hated Hungarians. So I proceeded to buy it. And then I bought another copy, that's how much I liked it! And then another! And then I travelled around the world buying the album wherever I found it, until I'd bought 3.6 million copies. To to be honest I don't entirely remember that part (hey, this was five years ago), but I must have done, because I know nobody else shares my prurient interest in the family life of the Hapsburgs, and what other explanation is there for a band with such a dorky name succeeding? (It does explain why my student loan looks like the International Space Station's wireless internet bill, though!)

Actually, you don't need to give a crap about the actual historical Franz Ferdinand to like this album or this band, although I can't say it hurts (particularly if you're really dying to know what All For You, Sofia is about). All you need is some ears, a brain, and a set of legs capable of kicking it. And I mention that because that's what this album will make you do! Yes, it's not as if a bunch of art school dorks making a band with an obscure name is something that the guys in Franz Ferdinand have copyright on - if they did, Kevin Shields would owe them a buttload of royalties. What makes Franz Ferdinand's Franz Ferdinand worthy of the name Franz Ferdinand is that this album will make you shake your pasty black-jean wearing alternative bootie. Catchy little numbers like 'Auf Asche' and 'Michael' simply demand your presence on the dancefloor, and I defy you not to listen to '40' without getting an urge to sway in time. Yes, I know what you're thinking as you sit there in your little student bedroom wallpapered with NME covers, listening to your Franz Ferdinand, saying "I don't know about you, poseur, but I don't dance". But as you're saying that, check out your feet, and if they're not tapping out a catchy number, then you either have no feet or you are LYING, on the INTERNET - one of the important things of today, no less- which is a possibility so unlikely it scarcely needs to be considered.

But it's not just about the music. Oh, the lyrics! So witty, so timely, so waspish and yet endearing! The Franzibalds cover such subject matter as annoying academic politics ('The Dark of the Matinee'), relationships with girls that are intellectually beneath them ('Auf Asche'), infidelity ('Cheating On You'), the tedium of workaday existence ('Jacqueline') and being stood up for a date, or being shot by a sniper, or being stood up for a date after being shot by a sniper, or whatever 'Take Me Out' is about - look, I don't know, what am I, a guy writing a fucking album review? Seriously, it's all gold here - all gold with the clanging exception of 'Tell Her Tonight', which is frankly the main thing that prevents this album from getting a higher spot. What possessed them to hold 'All For You Sofia' back as a single and put that frankly uninteresting number in the number two slot instead, I have no idea.

I'm a huge fan of Serge Gainsbourg, but it's always saddened me that he doesn't translate well into English - and apparently Franz Ferdinand are fans of his too, but rather than attempt the herculean task of trying to translate Serge's stuff into english (I'm serious! Mick Harvey tried to do it, and he couldn't, and frankly there's not much in life Mick Harvey can't do*) they decided to instead ask themselves 'what would Serge Gainsbourg have done if he'd been four Greco-Anglo-Scottish guys rather than one Franco-Russian-Jewish guy? Oh and also, if he ROCKED? And was a huge fan of The Kinks and The Who?''. Frankly there is no concievable answer to that question that isn't awesome, as you will know if you're one of the people who managed to get their hands on one of the albums I bought. Seriously, did you steal it? No, it's OK, keep it, it's cool. I've only got one stereo, so I'm 3,599,999 short of the number I'd need for the cool polyphonic effect I was presumably aiming for.

Similar and almost as good: The Kaiser Chiefs, 'Yours Truly, Angry Mob', Maximo Park, 'A Certain Trigger'
Similar and not as good: Anything by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs

*Except put up with Nick Cave for more than 25 years, and be fair - could you?

A few reviews ago I gave QOTSA the credit for killing nu-metal, but that's an oversimplification. Yes, Operation Make Fred Durst Get A Job At McDonalds As A Fry Chef was a two-pronged affair - QOTSA struck at him from within the metal movement, but he was outflanked from without as well by the musicians playing the style of movement that was generally referred to as 'low-fi' but which we snooty music critics might instead describe as high production values garage revival. Whatever you call it, this stuff, while not new even within the context of recent music - Blur laid out the essential musical template in 1997's eponymous album, and even they weren't really breaking any new ground - served as much as anything to put noughties music on a track whereby I can write a 'best ten albums of the noughties' series of posts and it isn't the musical equivalent of watching grainy looped stop motion footage of a man riding a unicycle into a lampost.

There's one lo-fi album that stands out as the one that truly broke new ground, that inflamed both the critics and the fans, and that formed the crest of the wave that would break and spawn a multitude of imitators, most of them with names that began with 'The' and some of whom actually didn't suck hardcore. And that album was... The Strokes' This Is It. But while The Strokes were a breath of fresh in the fart-in-a-lift musical fug of 2001, their debut album doesn't stand up so well in retrospect, let alone their later work. Sure, The Strokes had that sneery Noo Yawk Ramones-style style that was necessary to really make their way onto the scene, but ultimately musically they were more 'hmm' than 'WOW'! Thankfully the lo-fi scene was capable of producing at least one 'WOW' album, and that's the album I'm reviewing - The White Stripes' Elephant.

It's been said that nothing dates more than ideas about the future - 50s sci-fi tells us far more about the 50s than the future, for instance - but I would ally to that statement the corollary that ideas about the past date almost as quickly, although often in a way that's charming rather than hilariously jarring. This is a very retro album, and it's retro in a way that you could only be retro at a particular point of time. It was recorded with deliberately obsolescent technology, notably analogue equipment and magnetic tape, it features one song that's a cover of a Burt Bacharach song, another that opens with an early 60s self-help tape monologue, and features guest vocals by Holly Golightly. It even has a fricking cricket bat on the album cover! If this album was one of your friends, it'd be the one who will happily drive for three hours to buy a hand-stitched lampshade with embroidering of do-eyed elves riding crickets on the panelling from a thrift store in a small town.

Thankfully the retro ethos isn't restricted to cute design values, but it shines through on the songs themselves, to admirable effect. The whole thing was done with just one guitar, one drum track and no production values, and to be blunt, even if you don't like the music, you have to admire how lush, complex and layered these songs can sound, and exactly what these two kids from Detroit can coax out of the old catgut. In a sense I'd almost call this prog rock, in that you admire it for the musical proficiency over any emotional heft - except that it's about as far from the pompous beardy bluster of prog rock as you could possibly get, and that there's a fair degree of emotional heft, too.

Well, not emotional heft per se - unlike many of the albums I've ranked lower, you will rarely find yourself inspired to any emotive highs or lows by this album. But it's more than just clever - it's like a great night out with your friends, which, while you may not cover anything of any more consequence than whether Optimus Prime and Megatron were secretly having robosex ofc-camera, you will later look back on with great warmth and fondness on. There's no obvious emotive content in any of the songs - or any content that isn't over-wrought to the point of obvious irony, as on 'I Wanna Be The Boy To Warm Your Momma's Heart' or 'There's No Home For You Here Girl', but the whole is much, much greater than the songs.

And the lyrics! Oh, the clever, clever lyrics! This album is like a conversation - again, a conversation that's not about anything in particular, but will nevertheless leave you impressed and maybe even thoughtful. They're poetic, too, and there's a fair ammount of voice-as-instrument here - Jack White's blues training really shows, although he resists the urge to go into Tom Waits style salf-parody, something too many rock musicians inspired by blues don't ever manage.

I know what this is - it's not just the ultimate lo-fi album (although it's that), it's the ultimate hipster album. You might think that that was The Dandy Warhols '13 Tales from Urban Bohemia', but it's not - this album has so much indie rock cred, the Dandy Warhols themselves could record an album about this one. And it'd be good.

Similar and almost as good: Jet, 'Get Born', The Hives, 'Your New Favourite Band'
Similar and not as good: The Datsuns, 'The Datsuns'

It's no secret to those that know me that I am a pretty big Nick Cave fan. Unlike many Cave fans, I feel his best body of work came, not with the Bad Seeds, but with his first band, The Birthday Party, a seething, rocking, menacing, heroin-fueled gloom-rock band that almost defy description. But like most Cave fans, I generally feel that the peak of the Bad Seeds period came with the quadrology of albums starting with 1989's Tender Prey and ending with 1994's Let Love In. After whacking out these four modern classics, Cave went on to record 1996's Murder Ballads, an album I continue to maintain is intentional self-parody (Every single fucking song containing somebody getting killed, except for a Bob Dylan cover? Tell me that's not taking the piss, I double dog dare you), before descending into folksy, introspective meandering albums that seemed to imply he was trying to become an Australian version of Leonard Cohen. By 2003, Cave had submitted one of his least critically and commercially acclaimed albums ever in Nocturama, an album whose main virtue was the rambling but dryly ironic album closer 'Babe, I'm On Fire' which, while enjoyable, seemed to strongly suggest that Nick's heart wasn't in it, particularly if you saw the (14 minutes long) video.

So at the beginning of 2004 it was hard to be a Cave fan. When we found out that Blixa Bargeld, one of the only remaining founding Seeds and one of Nick's most productive collaborators was leaving the band, it became harder still. When it turned out that Cave was collaborating with the London Choral Society's Choir, scepticism began to strain at the boundaries of an indulgence hard won through years of dues-paying on Nick's part in filthy clubs throughout Europe and Australia. And when it turned out that this Blixa-less choir album was going to be a double album, well, let's just say expectations were low.

So what does Nick do for us, his long-suffering fanbase? He knocks it right out of the fucking park, that's what he does. Abattoir Blues / The Lyre of Orpheus (it's not just a double album, it's got two names! I'm probably cheating by reviewing it as a single album, but what the hell, right?) is the strongest thing that Nick's done since Henry's Dream by a long way. Amazingly, of the 18 songs here, there's no filler, no annoying self-parody or go-nowhere sub-Cohenisms. The band simultaneously manage to recapture the grindy funk that made the early 90s albums so good while finally honing the wistful folky ballads to a point where you think 'oh, right Nick, I see what you've been trying to do for the last eight years now'. There are so many standout songs on this album that it's hard to do more than touch on them - my personal favourite is 'Easy Money', but 'Nature Boy', 'Get Ready For Love', 'There She Goes, My Beautiful World', 'Messiah Ward', 'Spell', hell, see what happened there? It was too good for me to be able to discipline myself.

It's meant to be a vague concept album around the descent of Orpheus into Hades and his return and all that, possibly a more feminist re-telling (let's just say that Cave's Eurydice seems to have a lot more, um, agency than the hapless ghost trailing blindly after Orpheus we usually see), but I think that idea got jettisoned when it was decided to make it a double album. Oh, and I never thought I'd say this, but the choral backing vocals actually work - and not just on the pseudo-gospel numbers, but on the raunchier stuff too - the choral line on 'Nature Boy' really has to be heard to be believed.

Unfortunately, Nick proved unable to sustain the momentum; his next musical project, a whole new band (which consisted entirely of Bad Seeds members) was called Grinderman and seemed to basically be dedicated to trying to turn the song 'Hiding All Away' off of this album into an entire band, before returning to The Bad Seeds with 2008's 'Dig Lazarus Dig' and firing Mick Harvey, the only collaborator who'd stuck with him since the pre Birthday Party days. What does the future hold for Cave? Possibly more suckitude like that that enveloped him in 1996, but I'll probably still continue to buy his albums. The prick.

Similar and almost as good: The Veils 'Nux Vomica', Devastations 'Yes U'
Similar and not as good: Neil Young, 'Greendale'

Look, I don't know if you spend a lot of time going to the shiznit store, particularly around late 2005. But if you had done so, you'd probably have found every shelf they have stacked up with an album called 'The Back Room' by this band Editors. Well there's a good reason for that -- this album IS the sh

Start again.

Remember what I said about how 80s retro had been such a pervasive and creative musical dynamic throughout the nineties, and that including White Rose Movement in the top ten was basically my acknowledgement to the genre - that White Rose Movement were the most representatively 80s retro band I could think of? Well, that's still true, but I didn't mean to give the impression they were the best 80s retro band, because that honour unquestioningly belongs to Birmingham's Editors, a group of gloomy Anglo-Polish types who came storming onto the British musical scene. Prior to Editors (not the Editors, in what is probably the most annoying thing the band have ever done - even after four years of fandom I swill want to add the 'The' suffix) arrival on the scene, I was a pretty major Interpol fan, but post Editors, there really is no reason for Interpol to exist.

I can only presume the thought process goes something like this. 'Hey, everybody likes Joy Division, right? Every significant artist of the post-grunge era, from Smashing Pumpkins to The Strokes, have cited Joy Division as a major influence. Why don't we just try and pick up where Joy Division left off? Let's have a lot of drony songs about urban decay and alienated relationships and post-modern alienation with chimey guitars and fuzzy bass and robotic, thwacky drums that sound like a drum machine. Let's name the songs things like 'Blood', 'Fall' and 'Bullets'. Let's have lyrics like 'You burn like a bouncing cigarette in the road'. And just in case anybod doubts that we're aiming precisely for that sombre, priestly post-punk ethos, let's have an album cover that looks like a Bauhaus single from 1981. Oh yea, and let's do it REAL GOOD'.

Editors are not just the most important post-punk band of the noughties, they're probably one of the most important post-punk bands of all time. They're up there with Joy Division and Magazine and pre-Unforgettable Fire U2. There's a bit of Muse-type soaring vocals and millenarian lyrics, but unlike Muse, it never gets out of hand. This is why The Back Room is better than Kick - because Kick tries to take us back to the 80s (albeit the most awesome part of the 80s), while The Back Room takes us back to the 80s and then takes us on from there. While other post-punk groups are conducting archaeological experiments, Editors are snatching the torch from Joy Division's hand and carrying on with it.

This is one of the few albums I've liked from the first time I heard even a snippet of music from it - in this case, the music video for Munich which I caught on J2 in 2005. I've never looked back.

Editors went on to release 2007's almost equally excellent 'An End Has A Start', and remain one of the most vital forces in rock music going into the 2010s. Buy their albums; they deserve all the support they can get.

Similar and almost as good: Interpol 'Antics', The Faint, 'Danse Macabre'
Similar and not as good: The Rapture, 'Echoes'

Up until I started listening to their catalogue in order to better talk about them, I had intended for this spot to be occupied by 'Open Season', British Sea Power's second album. And while 'Open Season' will always have a special spot in my heart, chiefly because it's the first album of theirs that I heard, after a period of sombre (if not sober) reflection I've reached the unavoidable conclusion that, good as 'Open Season' is, 'Do You Like Rock Music?' is the superior album and the band's peak so far, not to mention one of the peaks of recorded music in the last decade.

It's hard to describe this album and do it justice in the same way it's hard to describe the Mona Lisa to somebody who's never seen it without being asked "So, what, it's just a picture of a lady? What's all the fuss?". I could talk at length about the effortlessly yearning tone of the vocals, the lyrics that evoke a picture-perfect sense of resigned nostalgia, or the lush guitar arrangements that remind you of what My Bloody Valentine might have managed if Kevin Shields had just cheered the fuck up (and also got out of bed some time between 1991 and 2007, but that's a rant for another time). But the charm of British Sea Power lies not so much in their musical craft - although make no mistake, their craft is very good - but in the ideology that suffuses their music.

Allow me to explain - and in doing so, possibly launch a habit of comparing bands to The Kinks equally as ill-advised as my recently-terminated habit of comparing them to The Clash. Like the Kinks, British Sea Power are a band with a mission and a message, and for all they soft pedal it, it's there. Like the Kinks, they believe in the special beauty of the British countryside and in the naive yet admirable pioneer spirit of Victorian exploration. They're the sort of band who will happily compose a song in honour of an Antarctic ice shelf (and they have! But it's not on this album). I can see what you're thinking as you read this, scratching your head in comic bepuzzlement - 'But Hugh, if that's what these guys are into, fair enough, but how can it possibly work in album form? And more to the point, don't glorification of the Little English lifestyle and Victorian-era Imperialism separately get your goat? Isn't that why you so heftily dislike Lord of the Rings and Steampunk, respectively? Isn't this band your own personal perfect storm of reactionary bullshit disguised as apolitical nostalgia?'

Well, yes, mr person who's obviously read every LJ post I've written in the last seven years, it should be, but it's not. Perhaps one question answers the other - perhaps the medium of a rock album makes that apolitical nostalgia seem real in a way that a movie or a book couldn't. Perhaps it's just that I can't believe that anybody this musically and poetically talented could be driven by such hateful impulses. Perhaps the wordplay is so obviously self-depreciating it's hard to get angry. Actually, it's probably mostly that. This album is humble - if it were a chair, it'd be a chair painstakingly assembled by a family of crofters living in a drystone hut on the Yorkshire moors. We're talking early-REM grade humble. "OK" this album says, "I'm just a simple collection of songs made by four guys who love singing about things they love. If I happen to be incredibly, achingly beautiful and lyrically fascinating, hey, I'm just glad you like it!"

If none of this explains British Sea Power to you, it's probably sufficient to note that they followed this up with 2009's Man of Arran, an alternative soundtrack to a 1937 documentary about life on a tiny island off the Irish Atlantic coast. That's just how they roll.

Similar and almost as good: David Bowie, 'Heathen', Coldplay, 'A Rush of Blood to the Head'
Similar and not as good: The Manic Street Preachers, 'Lifeblood'

It was hard being a heavy metal fan in 2000 and 2001. Your chosen genre was dominated by Limp Bizkit and their ilk, a group of sweaty Florida-based thugs whose main purpose seems to have been the Herculean task of making Korn look good by comparison. And, as a heavy metal fan, you're likely to have been a boneheaded patriot who cried rivers of blood when September 11th happened, so there's that too. But mostly it was the rap-metal, nu-metal, and various other brands of hyphenated-metal. At that stage, anybody who liked music above a certain volume would have probably welcomed a WASP comeback just for something new, but had instead to be content to constantly watch and re-watch This Is Spinal Tapp while crying into their dorritos.

But Josh Homme, Nick Olivieri and Dave Grohl, who I've always liked to imagine as a group of superheroes living in a fortress of solitude somewhere near Palm Desert, saw this state of affairs, yelled 'THIS CANNOT BE! TEAM QUEENS OF THE STONE AGE, COMBINE!' and, after donning their spandex outfits, rushed into the studio and recorded an album so perishingly good that it made turning it up to eleven at least faintly credible. This can't be overemphasised. Without QOTSA, more specifically without this album, any metal band you like that came onto the scene post 2003 would not have been; they'd have shrivelled up and died of embarassment rather than share a festival stage with Fred Durst.

This is a bit silly, really - not because I'm over-imputing the importance of this album, but because QOTSA didn't in fact crash onto the stage in 2002 like some sort of indie-metal meteorite; they'd been around for ages, the core of the band goes right back to the late 80s, when Olivieri and Homme worked together in Kyuss (a band named after a DnD diety? How fucking metal is that?), and their prior album, 'Rated R', had achieved a lot of positive notice, particularly among the famously snobbish UK-based music press. But Songs for the Deaf took them to centre stage, and deservedly so, which is good because centre stage is really the only place a metal band can occupy - it's not a genre that encourages dues-paying.

Hopefully comparing bands to The Clash isn't something I will continue to do during this exercise but it has to be said that Songs for the Deaf reminds me very much of London Calling - an exercise in genre-refining that ends up as a sort of tour of everything that's good in popular music. I characterise this as 'metal' because that's how the Queens and their fans see it, and there are certainly some very metal, indeed I would go so far as to say metal-riffic, moments here, such as opening track 'You Think I Ain't Worth A Dollar...' or 'The Sky is Falling', but elsewhere the band's pop sensibilities are at the fore, such as the surprisingly tender vocals on 'First it Giveth' or the pseudo-folky guitar whining on 'God Is on the Radio'. And while there's a great tradition of balladeering in metal, I wouldn't say 'Mosquito Song' fits into it very easily.

The Queens went on to record another very good album, 'Lullabies to Paralyse', and one rather disappointing one, 'Era Vulgaris', before Josh Homme decided to become a full time producer for, of all people, The Arctic Fucking Monkeys. But the fact that nowadays Fred Durst can't even get fucking arrested at Ozzfest is more than enough for any one man to look back on his life and say 'well done'.

Similar and almost as good: Mastodon, 'Crack The Skye', The Horrors, 'Strange House'
Similar and not as good: Limp Bizkit, 'Results My Vary'

If you're British you'll probably know The Libertines as that band Pete Doherty was in before he started propping up the Daily Mail's readership. If you're not British you probably won't know The Libertines at all. Either way, this is to your disadvantage, because, when the shambolic cultural history of the noughties comes to be written, they will occupy a crucial, if slightly quixotic, place. It's not entirely ironic that Doherty's particular brand of horrific-fascination celebrity has eclipsed the band itself, because Doherty never saw his personal life and his music as that separate. In a sense The Libertines are a road that popular British music didn't take, since most of the public were either put off by the cocaine-fuelled antics of the band members or became enamoured with the lead singer and transferred their allegiance to his not-nearly-as-good spinoff band, Babyshambles.

But that was all a bit meta. I can't very well decry the cultural consumer for obsessing over Doherty as a cocaine-sniffing supermodel chaser rather than a troubled indie-punk urban poet and then only write about Doherty in what's supposed to be an actual album review. It's appropriate that The Libertines took the step of giving this, their second album, an eponymous title, since it's on this album, not 2002's 'Up The Bracket', where the band itself really starts to come to life and come out from under the shadow of producer Mick Jones. The influences here are fairly murky and it's tempting, as a few over-enthusiastic reviewers did back in 2004, that this represents something genuinely new.

That's not quite true - there are elements of Bob Marley, The Smiths, The Happy Mondays and not surprisingly The Clash here. It's hard to put one's finger on what separates The Libertines from generic nineties shoegazer indie, but you won't confuse it with anything else after all but the most cursory listen. It could be the vocals - the band have two very strong lyricists and vocalists in Doherty and lead guitarist Barat, and they have a lovely little dual vocal harmony which they seem to fall into effortlessly, perhaps even unknowingly. It could even be the lyrics - when I call Doherty a poet, I do so advisedly, and while it would be reaching to say his songs are infused with higher meaning - no politics for The Libertines, at least until they started getting all side-projecty on us - it's certainly very easy to put yourself in his own cocaine-advocating shoes.

In a way it may be better that The Libertines didn't become the next Sex Pistols and launch an entirely new music movement, as they had the artistic, if not the popular, potential to do - I'm not sure I want to live in a world full of ten million Doherty wannabes (although it would do great things for the Daily Mail's gossip column). But this album is a great portrait of a dysfunctional, anarchic creative unit caught in a snapshot of its most productive moment.

Similar and almost as good: Babyshambles' 'Down in Albion', The Arctic Monkeys 'Whatever people say I am that's what I'm not'
Similar and not as good: Anything by The Streets

No attempt to sum up the dominant artistic trends of noughties music would be complete without some reference to a phenomenon that, back in the nineties, nobody could ever have taken seriously - eighties retro. White Rose Movement are here partly for this reason - they're not the only band on this list that owes something to the eighties, or more specifically to the eighties new-wave/post-punk musical school, but they are perhaps one of the most ashamedly resurrectionist bands. They're also unquestionably the best unashamedly resurrectionist band, easily better than any of their contemporary peers, and substantially better than a lot of the bands they pay homage to - I'm a big Depeche Mode fan, but Kick is easily up there with Black Celebration or Violator, and it blows anything Flock of Seagulls or Soft Cell ever did right out of the water. That's not to say that they are content to limit themselves to reaping the (admittedly fertile) vein of synth-rock - there are elements of Sisters of Mercy on some of the slower tracks.

So what do we have here? Eleven short, vicious, efficient songs, each one evocative of a post-modern cityscape populated by cynical, androgynous poseurs. It's all very synth heavy, but the synths don't mask the guitars, which are strong, even at times dominant. The vocals are sneering and gutsy, reminescent of a slightly lower-pitched Brian Molko. Lyrically it's all rather vague - I wouldn't to so far as to say songs like "Idiot Drugs" or "London's Mine" don't have some kind of message, but after thrashing them on my iPod nearly constantly for about a year, I'm no closer to figuring out what they are.

Kick is the band's only album; it's entirely possible they will go on to blot their copybook. While they've earned plenty of utterly deserved critical acclaim, White Rose Movement don't seem to be shifting big numbers of albums; Kick hasn't even gone Gold, and the band remain unsigned. Its cultural impact has been minimal, which is why it's only #10. But the reason it gets onto the list at all, where more culturall relevant albums and similar albums like 'Hot Fuss' don't, is this; if Kick didn't exist, and I was engaging in the mental experiment of imagining some hypothetical album that incarnated everything good about 80s retro, it would sound a lot like Kick.

Plus, 'White Rose Movement' is the name of a German anti-Nazi student movement in Munich University who happen to have been the subject of the first essay a 13 year old me ever wrote. How cool is that?

Similar and almost as good: Kasabian's 'Kasabian', The Killers' 'Hot Fuss'
Similar but not at all good: The Crystal Method's 'Divided by Night'

As the decade draws to a close it is time for a period of reflection, of somber hindsight as we consider the intellectual, social, political and cultural trends that shaped our lives. Like most discrete time periods, it is difficult to trace trends in a decade when one is just concluding it - it is tempting to throw one's hands up in the air and dismiss the whole ten year period as a cultural hodge podge. That's what I and my peers did as the nineties came to a close, deciding that, in contrast to the 60s, 70s and 80s, there was no single cultural trend that really identified the 90s as a discrete moment in humanity's creative history.

How wrong we were! And I my friends, ten years on, are now stocking our iPods with 90s retro music, bemoaning the disbandment of Oasis, and bashfully admiting that the only reason we enjoy Live is because we grew up with their music as teenagers. It's with this abortive attempt at hindsight in mind that I, ten years older, wiser and more cynical, am setting forth on a task that I may fail at, but which I think I owe it to my naive nineteen year old self, to say nothing of you, my readers, to attempt in good faith. Over the next few days I will attempt to present to you a definitive list of...

THE TEN GREATEST ALBUMS OF THE NOUGHTIES!

Of course, when assessing which albums are the 'greatest', I inevitably founder on an attempt to define the word 'great'. Are they the ten most musically competent albums? The ten most groundbreaking? The ten who have had the most impact on popular culture or influence on music? I'm not going to stick to any single definition of 'great' - I will rely on my intuition, which will probably contain elements of all of the above, and possibly more. Some of you will no doubt disagree with my choices, possibly because you think I'm valuing albums that had a massive pop cultural impact without necessarily being musically especially notable, or conversely that I am picking musically interesting albums that passed entirely beneath the radar. That's fair enough - for all the pomp and ballast I've indulged in above, this is, of course, a personal list. It's intended to be definitive and sweeping, but it's based on my own feelings about what's definitive and sweeping - if you disagree, please feel free to dissent, either here, or in your own journals.

Anyway. Roll on, number ten.

God, I really hate tea.

The more academic textbooks I read, the more I become convinced that the phrase "X's work has been of some small use", where 'X' is another researcher in the same field as the writer, is the academic equivalent of leaving a flaming bag full of dogshit on somebody's doorstep.

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Referenda for Everybody

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Separate But Equal

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Counterintuitive

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Bitching About Process

I've updated my political blog:

Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt - Environmental Rogernomics

I've been thinking about my blogging practices lately.

Several times I've contemplated deleting my LJ. Not because I'm unhappy with it per se, just that I can't seem to summon a great deal of enthusiasm for it. Instead I've decided to experiment with spreading my blogging activities out a bit more.

With that in mind I've created Tell Me That It Doesn't Hurt.* The idea is that that blog will become a receptacle for anything political I want to talk about, while LJ will be dedicated to my own personal life, random one-liners, movies and music and stuff like that. There's a lot of insightful political blogs on blogspot, and I guess this is my tentative attempt to engage with them, albeit only a little bit.

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting much about that second group of things, particularly my day-to-day life. It's not that there isn't much to write about - in the last two months I've ended a relationship, moved flats, met a whole bunch of new people and struggled mightily with University admissions. Very little of this has appeared in LJ; in fact I find it telling that I didn't even remember whether or not I'd posted about the relationship breakup! Turns out I did, but in a typical dick move, I banned comments on that particular post, which is probably why I didn't remember it.

The reason I banned comments is because leaving comments in would probably result in one of two things - a flood of 'aww that sucks' type comments, or nothing at all. The former I always find really difficult to respond to, even though I appreciate the thought behind them. I guess I'm sceptical about internet-based expressions of support, particularly LJ-based expressions. They're very ease to give, and to me that devalues them. I have no doubt that many of you would express your support personally if you actually saw me in the flesh, but for some reason that doesn't make it any better.

The latter, of course, would be even worse! So by not allowing comments I can pretend that I was going to get a huge flood of support.

Before you say anything, yea, I really this isn't very healthy. This is what's made me review my whole attitude to LJ. I don't want to engage in LJ-drama here, but it's possible that I will find that I don't want to continue posting here, that I'd rather direct my energies towards the political blog... or in fact that I don't want to post on either of them.

Hmm, this ended up being rather long winded. I certainly didn't intend to ostentatiously start announcing my maybe-departure from the blogosphere. My original point was, if you're interested in my political stuff, start reading Doesn't Hurt. I've got a few posts marinating which you might find interesting.

*Internet prizes available for anybody who can guess the origin of that name.