Top 40 Canadian Albums of the 2000s

Geek-chic pin-up Laura Barrett became known, as a solo artist, for one of the most absurd, unexpectedly-affecting musical moments you could ever imagine: a slow, sad, stirring, five-minute reading of "Weird Al" Yankovic's wacky Nirvana parody "Smells Like Nirvana," sung as a gentle lullaby over musical starlight of a plucked kalimba. The gesture said everything about the one-time Hidden Camera: it at once hilarious, heartbreaking, and strange. All these qualities are apparent on Barrett's debut solo LP, even if there's not a "Weird Al" cover to be seen. Matching tumbling kalimba patterns to broad, vibrant modern-orchestral parts, Victory Garden plays as the wild soundtrack to a sci-fi musical of the mind.

For a strapping redhead from Stampede City, Chad VanGaalen is sure a tinkerer: an inquisitive mind who builds his own instruments, modifies his equipment, and records the results on an array of analog-tape recorders. His songs are ad-hoc miniatures obviously the product of a tangle of wires and a busy mind, and his albums are as messy as his basement: jumbles of fragmented songs tossed uneasily together. Although his third LP makes many of these same musical jumping from hesitant guitar strumming to zapping homemade electronics in a jarring manner, Soft Airplane is united by a singular lyrical focus: death. Here, VanGaalen delves into the postmortem experience, wondering, aloud, what really does happen upon that instant of expiration.

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If the name suggests a gang of dames, know this: these Women are four sweaty, hairy, dude-ish, music-nerd noiseniks from Calgary. On their eponymous debut, the combo crank out a set of short, sharp, shrill songs that can be either sweetly melodic and staunchly strident; and, at certain blessed moments, both. Taking their rhythmic cues from nasty British post-punk and cosmic German krautrock, Women repeat ragged riffs with a vengeance, sounding like they're trying to grind their guitar-parts into the ground. The LP's calling card is its fuzzed-out, over-saturated sound; the band captured live by "producer" Chad VanGaalen in his basement and backyard, playing directly onto an array of old ghetto-blasters and reel-to-reel recorders.

When Japandroids started kicking out the jams at some rehearsal room at the University of Victoria, their goal was to make their two-piece sound like a five-piece. Playing insanely loud and rocking out without irony was, in a greater sense, a way of going back to their roots; guitarist/vocalist Brian King and drummer/vocalist David Prowse wanting to recapture the adolescent thrills of being a teenager in the garage. Post-Nothing's title hints at that conceptual Year Zero, and its songs don't dodge youthful exuberance; "Young Hearts Spark Fire" and "Wet Hair" fist-pumping, life-affirming, amp-rattling anthems about tearing up your humdrum small-town, and dreaming of escaping via the pure power of rock'n'roll.

The name doesn't lie: Nils Edenloff truly grew up on farmland in far-flung Northern Alberta. He spent his first 25 years there before moving to Toronto. Once in the city, he found a floodtide of memories from his rural childhood overwhelming him. Soon enough, they became songs, strummed hard on acoustic guitar and wailed in a hoarse-throated voice in serious debt to Neutral Milk Hotel's Jeff Mangum. Edenloff gave them Albertan names like "The Deathbridge in Lethbridge," "Frank, AB," and "Edmonton," and described them as being "about summers in the Rockies and winters on the farm, ice breakups in the spring time and the oil boom's charm." They're inevitably about Hometowns, too, and your inability to escape them, no matter how far you go.

By the end of the '00s, the rise of the blogosphere made remaining unknown an impossibility, yet Toronto songsmith Jordaan Mason's electric debut LP was somehow overlooked and underhyped. A thematically-taught suite of "semi-illiterate songs about sex and sickness and the decline of (stupid f**king) western civilization," Divorce Lawyers I Shaved My Head is a work of uneasy listening; Mason's bewailed, bawdily-strummed, grotesquely-confessional folksongs spilling like tortured bloodletting from an open emotional wound. With his raw caterwauling backed by a baroque nine-piece band of cardboard-box drums, saloon piano, musical saw, marching-band horns, and drunken choristers, the debt to Neutral Milk Hotel is steep, but not insurmountable.

Dan Boeckner was not only the lesser of Wolf Parade's twin songwriters, but had the lesser side-project, too; Spencer Krug's most awesome Sunset Rubdown looming over Handsome Furs' spotty 2007 debut, Plague Park. Yet, with their impressive second record, Face Control, Boeckner and wife Alexei Perry step out of those shadows. Inspired by a trip to Russia, the Furs authored an album as travelogue, the singular narrative headipedng due East and not looking back. Like all good road-trips, the journey is more symbolic than literal. As each post-punk-ish tune grows colder, blunter, and more desperate —vocals hoarse, guitars noisy scrawl, drum machines pounding— the pair venture ever deeper into the dark heart of Putin's post-Soviet Republic.

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Six years after finding fame as one of The Unicorns' twin frontmen, Alden Penner returned with Clues; his disinterest in both hype and spotlight obvious in the band's music. Helmed by Penner and former Arcade Fire hand Brendan Reed, Clues debuted with a dense, dark, distorted disc whose shadowy, labyrinthine songs are shrouded in a foggy recording. Vaguely reminiscent of Blonde Redhead or late-period Fugazi, Clues bore no resemblance to The Unicorns, and seemed ill-suited —somewhat deliberately— to the blogospheric era. Disinterested in delivering music of immediate gratification, the Clues LP creates a state of semi-confusion that rewards persistence and patience, revealing its varied charms only to those who return for repeat listens.

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