The Red Circle

36. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002)
Once upon a time, Jeff Tweedy and Wilco produced the sort of music that actually justified their lofty reputation and their pinnacle was 2002′s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. The story of the band’s tumultuous major label experience and various interpersonal breakdowns are documented in the equally brilliant documentary I Am Trying To Break Your Heart but the album itself never suffers from distraction. Jeff Tweedy’s trembling voice calls to mind Neil Young and Bob Dylan, the same rock and folk icons to whom most of Wilco’s music pays at least general tribute. The album’s composition and arrangement techniques are expansive but the band themselves always play with a notable restraint, keeping the song itself in focus through every musical detour. Layers of manipulated tape and an anachronistic electronic influence coexist with slide guitar, piano and violins throughout Yankee Hotel Foxtrot as the band create a whole work far greater than the sum of its deceptively simple parts. The remiander of the decade saw the departure of Tweedy’s main cohort Jay Bennett as the band embraced their newfound “hip dad” demographics to the detriment of their creativity but this album is destined to live on as an American classic.

35. Mastodon – Crack The Skye (2009)
If their 2002 helped define the decade of metal that followed, their 2009 opus will almost certainly do so for the foreseeable future. At once a fictional vision of Czarist Russia via astral projection and a contemplation of a very real young girl’s tragic death, Crack The Skye‘s music is as captivating as its concept is convoluted. The album spans fifty minutes with enough purpose to traverse galaxies. Not since Rush has anyone so effortlessly produced such consistently compelling expanses of progressive hard rock. The group shares more than fleeting musical similarities with the Canadian prog gods throughout Crack The Skye, a fact often attributable to the drumming of Brann Dailor. Dailor’s drumming is so disturbingly complex that it often becomes difficult to tell if he’s playing a fill or sticking to the beat and the band’s ability to find a heavy groove and stick to it keeps Dailor’s vitruoso play from disorienting the listener. The lack of a clear vocal identity between the group’s three singers hindered the band on their previous albums but on Crack The Skye, it creates an ambiguity that fits the disc’s concept and aesthetic nicely and a guest spot from Scott Kelly adds a dramatic counterpoint. All of the disc’s seven tracks are great standalone cuts but it’s obvious from the start that this music was designed to be experienced as an album. On the tour that followed its release, the band played the album in its entirety without breaks every night, accompanied by synchronized video.

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