Dundee Media Corner: My Top 25 Albums of the Decade

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

My Top 25 Albums of the Decade

The "best" albums of the Aughts? Nah. This is a list of the 25 albums that I have listened to and enjoyed and ultimately spent the most time with over the past ten years. I set out to make a modest list of 10 such albums, which quickly became 20, then inexplicably 26. After some deliberation, I sacrificed one and made it 25. (Apologies to Shellac's 2007 record Excellent Italian Greyhound.)

Many of the artists on my list had made waves in the preceding decade. Ghostface Killah had distinguished himself with the seminal Wu-Tang Clan records and his 1996 solo debut, but 2000's Supreme Clientele was still a shockingly advanced work of art. Sleater-Kinney had been indie stalwarts since the mid-'90s, and their 2002 album One Beat provided a stripped-down and cathartic sense of what the new millennium felt like. Modest Mouse had released records on the indie labels K-Records and Up before making their major-label debut with The Moon & Antarctica. Fugazi put the capstone on a stellar and incredibly influential career with their final album, The Argument. Bill Callahan bid farewell to his Smog alias in 2005 with what was quite possibly his finest work to date, A River Ain't Too Much to Love.

But some of the artists represented here were new faces in the '00s. The hip-hop duo Clipse hooked up with super-producers The Neptunes and recorded the incredibly self-assured debut, Lord Willin'. Emcee/musician/producer Madlib had his hands on more wax this decade than a candle-maker. His 2003 album Shades of Blue is a perfect example of the artist's ravenous - and yet somehow reverent - reinterpretation of classic sounds. And a young woman named Mathangi Arulpragasm, better known as M.I.A., introduced herself to a global audience with the endlessly inventive Kala. "No one on the corner has swagger like us..."

Ordered chronologically.

Supreme Clientele (2000) - Ghostface Killah