The 50 Best Albums of the 2000s: Numbers 38

The 50 Best Albums of the 2000s: Numbers 38 – 37

December 8th, 2009 MUSIC Cory Maidens

The double oughts are about to be over. Featured author and music obssessive Cory Maidens takes a look back at the first decade of the 21st Century in music, and lists his picks for the 50 best records to be released during its ten years

38. Jesu – Jesu (2005)
It takes nearly four minutes into the first song of Jesu’s self-titled debut album for the listener to discover that the droning repetition that’s been happening is part of an eerily beautiful melody. Until that point, the listener is forced to endure four minutes of distorted guitar plodding along at an ear-shattering volume. It’s this sort of discomfort that Justin Broadrick perfected as the creative force behind the iconic industrial-metal act Godflesh. As much as that band was about a bile-fueled process of deconstruction, Broadrick strives to create beauty with Jesu. The interesting thing about this album though is that as the song titles and lyrics suggest, nothing in life is quite that easy. At lengths ranging from seven to eleven minutes each, many of the tracks can feel like endurance tests, forcing the listener to invest a significant amount of time and effort to even crack the song’s surface. Broadrick has both the musical and technical vision to pull this sort of thing off, revealing a precise focus where most similar groups seem to meander. Jesu’s self-titled album is a master class in the mutation and manipulation of sounds that almost never gets bogged down in its extremely heavy concept.

37. Enslaved – Isa (2004)
Norway’s Enslaved may began as a fairly textbook black metal act in 1991, but the group’s albums began to take a progressive slant early on and by 2004′s Isa, the band had expanded the boundaries of one of metal’s most aesthetically difficult subgenres. Incorporating an increasing amount of vocal melody and keyboard accompaniment, their thoughtfully progressive direction was a unique step forward in metal’s storied evolution. Most importantly, Isa pairs the band’s phenomenal chops with a powerfully engineered sound. In refusing to be limited by black metal’s meager sonic vocabulary, Enslaved forced both insiders and the wider community to reconsider its creative potential. The eight phenomenal tracks average six minutes apiece and collectively showcase the group’s stylistic flexibility, shifting fluently between thrash metal and prog-infused melody. Enslaved are among the premier metal acts of the last two decades and Isa is the crowning achievement in a consistently stellar discography.

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Cory Maidens

Cory Maidens is a proud son of the American Midwest, a man of letters and an incorrigible bastard. Since acquiring his BA in English Literature, he has proudly avoided non-comic books as an apathetic eye-roll at intellectual elitism. He thinks that arguing is highly underrated as sport and engages in it more often than might be advisable to compensate for that perceived deficiency. He believes in gay marriage, The Daily Show and Bruce Springsteen. He enjoys hearing Southern voices read Civil War-era correspondence aloud.

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