The 50 Best Albums of the 2000s: Numbers 18 -17

December 22nd, 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

18. Bon Iver – For Emma, Forever Ago (2007)
The story of Bon Iver’s For Emma, Forever Ago was so intriguing that it almost threatened to overshadow the album itself. Singer Justin Vernon had intentionally stranded himself in a cabin in Wisconsin to shake off six years worth of pent up emotion and the result was nine delicately beautiful tracks of indie folk. Thankfully, Vernon’s singular voice justifies the creative cliche of solitude at every turn, creating an album riddled with moments both achingly beautiful and eerily haunting. The effect of Vernon’s pained howl and ghostly falsetto are amplified exponentially by the frequent use of multi-tracked vocals, creating a new, startling aural metaphor for isolation. At times sounding like the whistling wind and at others a dying animal, Vernon’s vocals define this album so brilliantly that it’s easy to forget just how good the music is. Ambient electronic sounds and carefully sparse instrumentation lightly adorn these otherwise straightforward acoustic folk songs, creating a texture that compliments the otherworldly singing.

17. Converge – You Fail Me (2004)
Though most of the group’s fans would claim this honor should go to the band’s previous effort Jane Doe, Converge’s You Fail Me signaled the band’s emergence from that album’s transitional cocoon into a leaner, more focused killing machine. Despite having been a band for over a decade, Converge abandoned much of the discordant static of their earlier work for a different sort of chaos. You Fail Me strips away the band’s previously spastic nature and reveals a mature and deeply emotional sound. Traditional song structures seep into the songs, the guitar work becomes much tighter and Jake Bannon’s indecipherable yelps begin to take form. Converge is a band whose career has always been about defiance to a certain degree and You Fail Me is the first album where that feels intellectually fleshed out in the lyrics and imagery. This is thinking man’s hardcore played with the intensity of mindless animals.

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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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