Top 100 Albums of the 2000s

The 2000s were mere months old when Japanese 'girl group' Hoahio delivered an album that, in many ways, foresaw the decade coming. A mix of musics, cultures, tones, and approaches, the album throws the radically avant-garde in with the luridly pop, dissolving distinctions between highbrow/lowbrow as it stirs. The second outing for Haco's trio summons a unique 'pan-Asian' sound mixing Middle Eastern percussion with traditional Japanese instrumentation, minimalist electronic tonalities, and hooks playfully reflecting R&B ballads and insidious Canto pop anthems. Yet, as much as Ohayo! Hoahio! is capricious and silly, it's also intensely beautiful, its sweet pop-songs swimming in delicately plucked koto and reassuring field recordings.

At the end of the '00s, Ólöf Arnalds' achingly brittle folksongs were barely known outside of Iceland (where, it must be said, she's hardly a household name, too). Yet, time shall surely be kind to her rapturously beautiful debut LP; a sparkling jewel that will come to light over the years, be treasured by listeners in subsequent decades. Arnalds' spartan, brittle, whittled-down folk music sounds like it's thousands of years old and made of crystal and smoothed into elegant shapes by the tender rasp of her voice. Members of Múm and Sigur Rós daub tuned percussion around Arnalds' plucked strings of guitar, harp, and violin, but you barely notice they're there; the music merely the skeletal frame on which Arnalds' singing hangs brightly.

Mira Billotte began the decade playing alongside elder sister Christina in the great Quix*o*tic, who fashioned a bizarre take on graveyard/Gothic girl-group garage-rock. Going solo-ish as White Magic, she set sail with slanting sea-shanties, her deep, soulful voice singing doleful refrains over maudlin minor-key melodies tinkled on ivories. Billotte plays piano like someone yet to find their sea-legs; her hands stumbling up and down the keys with more of a drunkard's lilt than a pianist's precision. As White Magic's tunes stagger and sway, and brushed drums toss and pitch, Billotte's voice flutters in gusts and zephyrs, chanting witchy incantations that summon the dark dread of the terrifying unknown that lurks beneath the seas.

Hear one of Scoutt Niblett's brittle ballads, and she sounds like some amazing Cat Power acolyte: her gloriously-hoarse voice sounding out soulful and doleful over a single spartan guitar. But that notion gets flipped with Niblett's other favored mode of musical delivery: cheerleader chants —sometimes literally spelling out words— matched to just a rudimentary drumbeat (I Am's most infamous slogan going, simply: “We're all gonna die!”). Each 'style' sounds achingly sad, but there's subversive humor writ in every note; the Emma Louise Niblett hiding behind the wig-wearing 'Scout' persona a performance-artist exploring the artifice of the songwriter; her only truths the self-styled mythology she spins on each disc.

Mirah Yom Tov Zeitlyn writes songs to “make sense of [her] place in the world,” exploring her relationships with lovers, friends, literature, culture, and geopolitics. These songs add up to daring, darling, girlie-ish albums, often produced, with much experimentalist panache, by Phil 'Microphones/Mount Eerie' Elverum. And none of these is better —is more of a glorious beacon of sweethearted artistry— than C'mon Miracle. When, mid-“Promise,” Mirah asks “would you promise to be kind?” to the paramour she's handed her heart to, it feels like she's asking the same of each listener. This LP is one long vulnerable state; Mirah laid out, naked, at the feet of an audience she hopes harbor sympathetic hearts.

The second LP for Le Tigre —Kathleen Hanna's post-Bikini-Kill dance-rock party— makes a fine, fun art out of sloganeering. Kicking off with “LT Tour Theme,” an anthem whose chorus proclaims “For the ladies and the fags, yeah/we're the band with the rollerskate jams,” Le Tigre knock out cuts that make rudimentary drum-machines and cheap keyboards the tools of virtuous protest. Though their rhymes're often funny (try: “Go tell your friends I'm still a feminist/but I won't be coming to your benefit” or “all my friends are f**king bitches/best known for burning bridges”), they deal with depression, artistic ennui, corporate co-opting of underground culture, academic elitism, and, yes, feminism.

Few would've expected party music when the crown prince of math-rock, Ian T. Williams, was assembling a so-called 'supergroup' of hot players. Yet, Battles, in spite of all their dork-worthy credentials —Williams' jam-band rounded out by vocal experimentalist Tyondai Braxton, former Lynx guitarist Dave Konopka, and manly skinsman John Stanier, who’s sat on the stool for Helmet, the Mark of Cain, and Tomahawk— were the '00s' most unlikely dancefloor fillers. On their debut LP, Mirrored, the quartet create complex compositions of dynamic, overlapping rhythms that are really, really rhythmic; swarms of fretboard-tapping guitars and cymbal-rattling drums gathering a kinetic sense of momentum that favors ass-shaking over chin-stroking.

After years of instrumentalist precision in math-rock dons Don Caballero, future Battles boffin Ian Williams cut loose with Storm and Stress. Their '97 debut was a free-jazz-ish wreck of smashing glass, guitar shards, spasmodic bass, absurdist lyricism, and erratic percussion. But, where that first S&S LP made a dynamic, almost violent spectacle out of cacophonous arrhythmia, 2000's Under Thunder & Fluorescent Lights found the band were doing something more unexpected: using rhythmic discordance as a study in isolation. As melancholy guitar flutters, doleful vocals, eerie keyboards, and Tourettic drum tics float by like ships passing in the night, there's an exquisite loneliness in the way these individual parts never quite come together.

Bradford Cox released a lot of music in the '00s: three albums fronting Deerhunter, two under the name Atlas Sound, and a countless procession of home-recordings via his blog. His best work, the second Atlas Sound LP, Logos, almost was done in by Cox's fondness for sharing, after he accidentally made it available in an early version. After first feeling as if he couldn't be bothered finishing it, Cox determined to make the finished Logos so glorious it obliterated the early version. Boasting guest spots from Laetitia Sadier of Stereolab and Panda Bear of Animal Collective, Logos effortlessly mixes eerie ballads with dreamy drone pieces and krautrock-inspired workouts, making for a career-defining distillation of Cox's '00s discography.