The Best of 2000

1.    PJ Harvey/Stories From The City, Stories From The Sea      

Where there is hope, there is melody; where there is melody, hope.  With every outing,  P J Harvey achieves a new greatness.  The particular greatness of Polly Jean Harvey’s fifth and most assured album emanates from her limber, guitar-forged melodies which give life to songs confronting the peace and isolation of water and the paranoia of the city.  There is a mood of directness and devotion in these songs not so consistently present since the landmark Dry.  (Consider the confessional carnality of “This Is Love,” the noisy punk defiance of “Kamikaze.”)  In this bright environment, the album screams “hope.”  The soulful “A Place Called Home,” a track “from the sea,” promises—one day—a lasting “place for us.”  In the ruggedly poetic “One Line,” its rhythm propelled by an edgy 7/8 guitar figure and warmed by Thom Yorke’s shimmering vocals and synths, Harvey offers a mesmerizing comfort, drawing “a line...to your heart from mine/A line to keep us safe.”  Later, Yorke’s plaintive tenor occupies the centre of the graceful, mournful “This Mess We’re In,” a duet in which permanent images of the city (a midweek sunset, a teeming freeway, skyscrapers) symbolize love as hazardous and ephemeral but also inevitable.  The languorous “Horses In My Dreams” paints an image of an artist emerging from her rock and roll fame, “pulling herself free” of its burdens as horses might, the fatigue of the experience resonant in her supple voice.  Its arrangements spare and rock-simple, Stories shows that great artist carrying on, creating on a level of her own.      

2.    Radiohead/Kid A  

“Where do we go from here?  The words are coming out all weird.”  Thus pondered Radiohead in “The Bends,” the frantic, bracing title song for the Oxford band’s second—and first great—album, in 1995.  This wondering about what next—especially how we maintain humanity and expression in an ever mechanized, impersonal world—lies at the heart of the two albums that have followed.  The great OK Computer, from 1997, wrapped Thom Yorke’s luminous but often frightful vocals around songs rendered within fairly traditional structures.  In the experimental and highly unpredictable Kid A, these musings show up not just as lyrical or textural ideas but inhabit entirely new song forms as well.  The album alternately resounds in the surreal, in the quiet, and cold reality.  The murky opening, the ironically titled “Everything In Its Right Place,” throbs with an insistent electric piano, driving a nightmarish stream of consciousness peppered by whispered electronic voices that echo in and out like wasps.  Thom Yorke’s liquid croon becomes treated vocal debris in these treatments and in “Kid A,” its melodies as if lifted from a twisted music box, the vocal distortion evoking the voicelessness of the very young.  At the centre of the album is Radiohead’s boldest application, the use of electronic ambience (“Treefingers,” “In Limbo”).  Within this sonic wash, Radiohead considers what it means for a rock band to achieve its certain greatness: the swaying acoustic grace of “How To Disappear Completely,” its irrepressibly melodic beauty pitted against a straining, dissonant wall of string-synth chords, the latter a reminder of the seamier side of music-making.  Kid A illustrates that Radiohead is willing to do what it must to remain musically alive, or else disappear completely—a measured but noisy response to an industry fond of placing artists in neat, predictable packages. 

3.    BT/Movement In Still Life  

It isn’t the uncompromising throb and snap of the tracks on Brian Transeau’s first full-length disc that make it the best electronica of 2000.  It is a given that good electronic music will dish up delectable amalgamations of beats and melodies.  BT’s Movement In Still Life stands out because while you’re ass-shaking and head-banging, your head is  spinning at the stylistic diversity diabolically laced into its eleven “movements.”  The album’s in-your-face opening salvo, leadoff tracks “Madskillz-Mic Chekka” and “Never Gonna Come Back Down,” demand immediate attention in two forms—volume and body movement—the latter track punctuated with the techno-geek consciousness-streaming vocals of M. Doughty, late of the Boston jazz-hop troupe Soul Coughing.  The album cuts things more starkly and organic, displaying the artist’s guitar and vocal skill, with the melodic electro-rock of “Shame” and “Satellite” and the wicked hip-hop crunch of “Smartbomb.”  Transeau could have been content as another highly competent remix DJ, as his initial work suggested.  Thank goodness he seeks more.

4.    Richard Ashcroft/Alone With Everybody  

No artist in rock writes and sings with a broader, more ambitious brush than Richard Ashcroft, leader and voice of the dissolved English rock quintet the Verve.  That band’s last album, Urban Hymns, from 1997, was one of the highlights of the Nineties; history may ultimately remember it as one of the best albums of all time.  Like Hymns, Ashcroft’s first album on his own is a rapturous, sweeping affair.  But even with its frequent orchestral and choral flourishes, this is not Urban Hymns 2.  Alone With Everybody occupes a somehow more intimate, less confrontational territory.  In 2000, no other great album so consistently evoked images of wide-open spaces, both real and imaginary, or displayed such ease and grace in the consideration of the most vast of themes: love and devotion, the acceptance of change, togetherness and isolation, discovery.  Love and devotion: The swaying, leisurely soul of “I Get My Beat,” the old-school lyricism of “You On My Mind In My Sleep.”  The acceptance of change: the rangy strains of  “Brave New World,” its emotionally spent narrator forced to ponder “the other side.”  Togetherness and isolation: the bemused resignation of the briney “On A Beach,” its defiant castaway “on fire...full of love and new desire.”  Discovery: the nervous energy of a first walk through “New York,” here punctuated by Ashcroft’s understated but roiling guitar.  Alone With Everybody, like Ascroft’s Verve albums before it, illustrate that it’s possible for rock and roll to be direct but also ornate and beautiful, to the service of grand themes.

5.    Sleater-Kinney/All Hands On The Bad One  

Very few rock bands exhibit the intuitive understanding of the art of the guitar-based pop song evident in the work of Olympia’s Sleater-Kinney.  The songs on All Hands On The Bad One make their essential point—the empowerment of young women, beautiful and imperfect, through rock and roll—in the trio’s usual short, straightforward, confrontational way.  But the seeming simplicity of this music reflects an underlying melodic efficiency, made whole by the meticulous blending of the guitars and vocals of Carrie Brownstein and Corin Tucker and the relentless blast of Janet Weiss’s drums.  All Hands perhaps lacks the explosive verbal creativity of 1997’s Dig Me Out, one of the last decade’s best albums, but it is a grinding document of a great rock band continuing to evolve into something steadily subtler and even cheekier (“You’re No Rock n’ Roll Fun”) in its manifestos, an evolution that began with 1999’s The Hot Rock.  This change makes Tucker’s shriller, angrier moments even more commanding than they already were.  At the end of the day in rock and roll, it’s about songs.  From the opening ooh-wah hand-clapping hopefulness of “The Ballad Of A Ladyman,” to the propulsive, vigilant “Ironclad,” to the masterful title track—scattering alternating harmonic wails by Brownstein and Tucker and a pounding, jungle-beat, singalong chorus punctuated by Weiss—Sleater-Kinney understand this.

6.    Hybrid/Wide Angle  

The twentieth century composer Ralph Vaughn Williams probably would have appreciated Hybrid.  Vaughn Williams was a master of symphonic melody—sweeping, sometimes lurching soundscapes that were inspired by rolling ruggedness of Great Britain, his native country.  We get a similar musical environment from Welsh trio Hybrid in their stirring, poetic debut Wide Angle.  The group’s name suggests its objective: the synthesis of one or more forms to create a third; the album’s title suggests the limitlessness of its musical palette.  Here those forms take shape in tracks blending club-friendly, break-beating, crackling techno-trance, acid-jazz vocals (brilliantly rendered by Julee Cruise), and symphonic figures evocative of past masters.  These brews are best  exemplified best in tracks like “Sinequanon,” which juxtaposes rapper Soon-E MC’s French vocals against a vast, soaring symphonic wall, a spasmodic techno beat, and an unlikely root to the organic, an electric piano; in the unsettling, foreboding lurch-and-slam of “If I Survive;” in the murky soul of “I Know;” and in the beautiful schizophrenia of “Dreaming Your Dreams.”  The latter track begins as something dark and even invasive—not dreams but nightmares—but melts into something altogether reassuring.  Cruise follows you, feels for you, sings for you, dreams your dreams...and the piece becomes a comforter, not a threat.  These sorts of journeys are the frequent manifest of Wide Angle.  

7.    Neil Young/Silver & Gold  

Of all the words a person could use to describe a Neil Young album, you wouldn’t think “romantic” would be one of them.  But it fits for Silver & Gold, a beautifully understated, crustily graceful hug for all the artist holds dear, now and throughout his seminal career, stretching seamlessly into a fourth decade: a good band with good friends, good earth, a good song, a lazy day, a good-hearted woman.  The album couldn’t start better than “Good To See You,” simple, kind words that could pass between Neil and his fans or just Neil and his wife—it wouldn’t even matter who’s saying them.  An image couldn’t be more vivid, more nostalgically whimsical, than in “Daddy Went Walkin.”  How many rock and roll songs have ever been written about an old man taking a stroll with an old dog, maybe getting a little dusty?  This is an album about love, sort of that everyday kind; it inhabits every well-worn corner of the world Young decides to conjure here.  As he ponders the “Red Sun” setting on a railroad town, he’ll still be right by your side.  In one of the album’s most poignant moments, the wistful, gently clattering “Distant Camera,” he writes, “If life is a photograph/Fading in the mirror,/All I want is a song of love/to sing to you.”  The sweet folk tune that represents the album’s title track—its lilting, snaky melody emphasized as he doubles his voice with his masterful acoustic guitar—surely is one of his greatest songs.  It is simple and metaphoric and recalls another, decades older song which told of quests for “gold.”  “I used to have a treasure chest/Got so heavy that I had to rest/I let it slip away from me/Didn’t need it anyway.”  But I think he held onto that heart of gold. 

8.    Bernard Butler/Friends And Lovers  

For many years, Bernard Butler played his exquisite guitar as part of Suede, the glam-influenced rock band from London.  While Suede (for legal reasons exasperatingly forced to use the moniker London Suede in this country) made their Nineties mark with several sublime works in that Seventies glam vibe, the group’s somewhat narrow musical mission, greatly shaped by flamboyant front man Brett Anderson, must have been frustrating for Butler.  The two powerful solo albums that we have so far from Butler, 1998’s People Move On and Friends & Lovers, speak of an artist much less complicated, much more interested in getting on with it.  Like People, Friends & Lovers rings with the acidic, bluesy buzz and croon of Butler’s guitar, which curls around his  light, urban-cool voice.  His melodies are simple, his arrangements are earthy (organs, pianos, cellos), his themes are familiar (facing and withstanding adversity, living for the moment), but Butler’s achievement in Friends & Lovers is in the execution of an album that becomes that increasingly rare of things: flawless, unpretentious rock and roll for grown-ups.  Butler’s beseeching voice can breathe life into the quietest of ballads.  In this mode, fewer songs are as uplifting as the glorious “Smile,” piano and seagulls giving a sense of the emptiness that motivates the song’s sentiment.  (“Stoned despair/Just leaves our minds unaware/Until we sing this song.”).  But Butler’s Claptonesque guitar gives every song, even the most nakedly introspective, a compelling, incendiary energy.  It is aflame in the Stones-y rave-up “You Must Go On” and in the anthemic “No Easy Way Out,” energized by a sly acoustic guitar.  It gives motion to the psychedelic swirl of the title song and lends an almost nostalgic chime to the cheekily noisy self-lullaby “What Happened To Me.”  It rips open the long, seething “Has Your Mind Got Away?” the album’s most elaborate number.  While with Suede, Bernard Butler helped create some of the most compelling British pop of the last decade—the albums Suede and DogManStar possess an undeniably mesmerizing energy.  After Butler’s departure, Suede have remained highly competent but have not extended that early creativity, but its soul can still still be heard. 

9.     Björk/Selmasongs  

This artist called Björk, precocious Icelandic sprite, loves noises and experiments.  This fact is obvious from her amazing records, which combine an organized, if craggy, approach to rhythm, a primal desire to create block-rocking beats, and a sort of minimalist view of instrumental arrangement.  Post (1995) and Homogenic (1997) especially stand out.  After portraying Selma, a woman who escapes the tragic inevitability of her blindness through Hollywood musicals, in the 2000 film Dancer In The Dark (an acclaimed, feted film performance Björk insists will be her last), you could say her career itself has become a kind of experiment.  The seven-song Selmasongs, inspired by that character and her plights, is an unpredictable busy box of musical havoc.  Just when you think there won’t really be an actual song in the crashing industrial carnage that opens “Cvalda,” it turns into a sparkling showtune, just one accompanied by “clatter machines.”  In a kindred way, ”In The Musicals” skips along with a buoyant joy, Vincent Mendoza’s whimsical orchestrations backing Björk’s percussion tricks.  As the song progresses, she is a curious child, as if let out of the house at the first blush of spring, picking up anything along the way —someone’s ball? scraps of wood?—that looks like it might be fun, let alone musical, tossing it aside just as quickly.  The wheezy clattering of a train insinuates the percussion track in the intimate, conversational “I’ve Seen It All,” soaring strings and Thom Yorke’s vocals (at their most vulnerable) providing it a timeless gravity.  The chilling emotional rush and crescendo of “107 Steps,” Siobhan Fallon steadfastly counting them out, provides a gripping cinematic moment.  Selmasongs is the music Björk can create when music isn’t top priority.  Can we even begin to imagine the likely achievements of Vespertine, arriving in 2001?

10.   VAST/Music For People

“It’s time to laugh, it’s time to cry/It’s time to be what you need to be” (from “Free”).  And so it is with VAST’s Music For People.  The first album from Humboldt, California, guitar prodigy, multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Jon Crosby, 1998’s Visual Audio Sensory Theater (its title giving a hint at the drama within) suggested an artist interested in overturning new stones in the melding of the traditional rock idiom with more ethereal orchestral and world-music textures—all delivered in a mature, wrenching world-weary voice improbable for one so young.  The album’s only real flaw was in overdoing some of the more experimental treatments, robbing some moments of an emotional spontaneity such as epitomized in its haunting and rivetting central track, “Touched.”  In the follow-up, Music For People, Crosby finds an equilibrium blend, assisted now by permanent collaborators with whom he forms a rock trio which forms the backbone of his   harrying, breathless song cycle.  The music hurtles along as if chased.  The disquiet is immediate, Crosby’s halting acoustic strumming and Thomas Froggatt’s insidious bass slowly creaking open the Pandora’s Box of “The Last One Alive,” a defiant celebration of hard-earned freedom in the face of betrayal.  Like images blurring by like a speeding train, VAST’s musical moments flash by continously—watch it, here comes “Free” and its blazing backbeat rock stomp.  You can breathe a little within the soaring “I Don’t Have Anything” or the darker “Blue,” its naked opening piano betraying the lost hope of the song’s narrator, its alternating 5/4 and 6/8 signatures suggesting a fundamental uncertainty, its orchestration suggesting a fundamental gravity.  Later, “Song Without A Name,” its corners tinged with Eastern chanting, suggests an ultimate optimism, even if such moments will “always slip away.”