The 50 Best Albums of the 2000s: Numbers 30

The 50 Best Albums of the 2000s: Numbers 30 – 29

December 14th, 2009 MUSIC Cory Maidens

The double oughts are about to be over. Featured author and music obsessive 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

30. Modest Mouse – The Moon & Antarctica (2000)
There was a time before “Float On,” Johnny Marr and chart-topping album sales for Modest Mouse. The Seattle area act had established themselves with 1997′s The Lonesome Crowded West and their major label debut The Moon & Antarctica was one of the first steps in the “indiefication” of mainstream rock. Like fellow west coast popsters The Shins, Modest Mouse had taken the skewed pop formula of the Pixies in their own direction, maintaining the core weirdness and off-kilter vocal delivery but eschewing guitar-driven power in favor of intriguingly dense instrumentation and recording. Vocalist and songwriter Isaac Brock intently sabotaged most of the disc’s radio pop potential with his combination of impressionist flair and potty mouth but the disc is jammed with some of the band’s most obvious standouts. The album’s fifteen tracks combine for a nearly flawless hour of classic indie rock that continues to bear relevance on the genre nearly a decade after its release, a shocking feat in the age of blog hype and increasingly tenuous indie street cred.

29. The Dillinger Escape Plan – Miss Machine (2004)
While the group’s Calculating Infinity is among the definitive and most influential albums of the last decade, Miss Machine is the Dillinger Escape Plan’s finest work. The band reinvented their immediately-imitated style by applying cohesive structures to their jarringly chaotic musical gymnastics. Borrowing a bit from the vocal style that Faith No More’s Mike Patton lent to their previous collaborative EP, Greg Puciato incorporated melodic vocals into tracks that had evolved well beyond metal’s accepted boundaries. Varying influences from IDM to Nine Inch Nails were becoming more evident in tracks like “Phone Home” and “Unretrofied.” Some of the band’s early fans cried foul, but their complaints were ultimately short-sighted. While Calculating Infinity might have defined metal’s path, Miss Machine presented the listener with an alternate vision, one in which metal could reach the mainstream without losing its legitimacy. Once again, Dillinger Escape Plan created intelligent, abrasive music that seemed outside the previous scope of possibility.

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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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