30. Phoenix 'It's Never Been Like That' (2006)
Virgin
It's with much, much irony that the album that broke Phoenix from cult rockband to crazy commercial success was 2009's patchy Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix. AKA: the disappointing follow-up to far-and-away the best record of the band's career. The third Phoenix LP comes completely stuffed with near-perfect pop-songs: “Rally,” “Consolation Prizes,” “Second to None,” “Long Distance Call”... these are jams that many songwriters would murder their mothers to offer, but here this crew of French fops seem to toss them off effortlessly; the clanging guitars, keyboard squelches, and Thomas Mars' lyrics rolling out smoothly. If there's a criticism to be leveled at It's Never Been Like That, it's that it's a little too perfect.
29. The Strokes 'Is This It' (2001)
RCA
Seen through hindsight's lens, it's easy to hate The Strokes; given they inspired a retrograde rock-revival in which dudes dressed in shaggy hair, tight trousers, jean jackets, and casual misogyny acted like the world owed them something. Yet, there's no denying their debut is a killer rock record. For an album made by a hyped-to-death band who changed a musical decade, Is This It is, as its rhetorical (read: question-mark-lacking) title suggests, unaffected and unimpressed. Though the chugging guitars and push-beat rhythm section barrel along with irrepressible swagger, the tone is truly set by Julian Casablancas's half-sung, plain-spoken lyrics, which he delivers with a nonchalant shrug part Lou Reed, part Stephen Malkmus.
28. Vampire Weekend 'Vampire Weekend' (2008)
XL
Essentially the musical equivalent of a Wes Anderson movie —all literary heritage, belletristic privilege, and droll irony— it's no surprise than Vampire Weekend's debut met with reactionist slander. Doubly so due to the fact that the quartet draw heavily from West African guitar-pop; frontman Ezra Koenig proudly rocking that high, bright, dry guitar sound. This intercontinental influence leads to claims the band were culture thieves and Paul Simon wannabes; but they're clearly more clued up, mocking the “world music ” generation in “Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa,” where Koenig sings, “it feels so unnatural/Peter Gabriel, too,” before sardonically asking “Can you stay up to see the dawn/in the colours of Benetton?”
27. Dirty Projectors 'Bitte Orca' (2009)
Domino
Dirty Projectors spent the whole decade toiling under his Dirty Projectors handle, making amazing, idiosyncratic albums that, for most of the '00s, remained ignored. That changed with Bitte Orca, in a very big way. The seventh DP LP —a grand, irrepressible pop record of bright, bold colors and crazed compositions— broke the band out of the underground and into the spotlight. Fittingly, the set marked the culmination of the many varied, particular, peculiar strains of hipster musicology —pointillist orchestration, West African guitar pop, thudding R&B sub-bass, competing polyrhythms— Longstreth had dabbled in. This time, he piled them all on for an album of constant thrills; an utter joy for longtime Longstreth lovers or neophytes alike.
26. Parenthetical Girls 'Entanglements' (2008)
Tomlab
On their third longplayer, Portland's Parenthetical Girls went wholly orchestral, fashioning a fruity set of densely-scored, elaborately-layered mini-symphonies drawing from folk like Raymond Scott, Scott Walker, and Burt Bacharach. The songs zip about with the jaunty jollity of a distant era, their devil-may-care accelerando bursts pirouetting with the kind of gay abandon usually reserved for Merrie Melodies episodes. Forever running counter to the orchestrated schmaltz is frontman Zac Pennington: his fruity, gender-confused crooning; his thesaurus-leafing lyrics; his perpetual lyrical attraction to the bodily and the grotesque. Wedding such words to woofing woodwinds and zinging strings, Entanglements is an inspired marriage.
25. Scott Walker 'The Drift' (2006)
4AD
Scott Walker, that one-time teen-pop pin-up turned legendary avant-garde recluse, moved further into the darkness with The Drift. Issued when Walker was 63, the set shows a daring usually associated with youth; but, perhaps, it was the feeling of ever-nearing death that inspired Walker to once again throw caution to the wind. Here, he continues exploring the farthest reaches of the extremes of songcraft; embracing atonalism, dissonance, friction, and bizarre narrative literalism: “Clara” finds percussionist Alasdair Malloy punching on a side of pork to summon the sound of angry citizens clubbing the strung-up corpses of Benito Mussolini and his mistress in a Milan piazza. It makes for the most extreme, intense, and nasty Walker set yet.
24. Antony and the Johnsons 'I Am a Bird Now' (2005)
Secretly Canadian
Many a concept-record was made in the '00s, but only one symbolized the physical journey from male to female as a chick growing into a bird. Suitably enough, that only-one was the second record for gender-confusing crooner Antony Hegarty; a warbling songbird whose pipes sound more like Nina Simone than any fella you could think of. Working, again, under the name Antony and Johnsons, Hegarty delivered a tender set of transgender torchsongs that told of transgression, transformation, and taking wing. Doing so, the the pianoman's peerless pageantry was so utterly Classical in its approach and raw in its beauty that you could forget the Leather Pants guest list (Lou Reed, Boy George, Rufus Wainwright) and learn to love it for all its lumps.
23. Frida Hyvönen 'Until Death Comes' (2005)
Secretly Canadian
Pounding at her piano with a fearsome fierceness, statuesque Swedish songstress Frida Hyvönen —six feet of vicious lyricism and brutal honesty— laces toe-tapping tunes with uncomfortable truths. On her debut album, Hyvönen comes across as a performer ripe with sins to confess and scores to level. That starts with “You Never Got Me Right,” two minutes of barreling, boisterous, piano/male-bashing that strikes blows at a condescending former beau. It stands alongside the jaw-dropping “Once I Was a Serene Teenaged Child,” whose casual references to anatomy and unguarded recollections of nascent sexuality are at once hilarious and shocking, singalong and profound. It's a blinding highlight: the best songs on one of the decade's best albums.
22. El Perro del Mar 'From the Valley to the Stars' (2008)
The Control Group
Of the three albums for impossibly-breathy Swedish chanteuse El Perro del Mar, this is, mistakenly, regarded as her least essential; the difficult-second album stuck between the Brill Building pop of her self-titled 2006 debut and the languorous disco of 2009's Love is Not Pop. It's likely because those (admittedly amazing) discs turned the familiar happy-music-with-sad-lyrics trick, whereas From the Valley to the Stars turns that inside-out. A concept album, of sorts, about transfiguration, its lyrics are awash in joy whilst its music sounds solemn. As the songs steadily 'ascend,' the arrangements shed weight, until all that's left is the holy sound of barely-there organ chords and El Perro Del Mar's rapturous whispers of happiness.
21. The Concretes 'The Concretes' (2003)
Licking Fingers
Here lies the dazzlng debut of The Concretes: an ungodly-good girl-group from Stockholm harboring —as jams like “You Can't Hurry Love” and “Diana Ross” attest— a serious Supremes love. Swaggering like Ronnie and layering on instruments like Phil, the Swedes conjure the Spector of past pop with wall-of-sound arrangements stacking organ, harp, strings, and choirs skywards. What sets their music apart from other old-R&B revivalists is the inescapable feeling of melancholy; as personified by the sad, Hope Sandoval-ish voice of Victoria Bergsman. Years later, Bergsman would eventually be kicked out of the band, then find fame as Taken by Trees, but for one brief, 40-minute moment, The Concretes were the best band in the world
