The Best of 2001

1. Tool/Lateralus

Nothing is simple about Lateralus; little in it emerges as first appears. What it reveals, it reveals slowly, in brooding sonic drips like some ironbound Pollock painting. If Tool’s titanic Ænima (1996) investigated cleansing and renewal through various sorts of destruction, Lateralus ponders redemption through rebuilding. Less an outward-looking manifesto than Ænima, the more inward, reflective, even spiritual Lateralus wrestles with the difficult aftermath of the binge and purge which resonated through that album, wrestles with the inevitable emptiness that has to remain--and with its consequences. And it becomes apparent early on that to confront this experience and live through it--unexpectedly, hungry and reeling--is to re-enter the world with a shout, one's heart pounding, one's mind keen to feed anew. On “The Patient,” the brilliant double-edged title hints at the continuing emotional bloodletting and the sighing resignation to the process. Its protagonist reminds us that “if there were no desire left to heal...no rewards left to reap...no loving embrace to see me through,” he would have “walked away by now.” Similar in tone, ”Parabola” chronicles the narrator’s reentry into the land of the awake and the aware, into “holy reality,” the body reminding him that, ultimately, all the pain is just an illusion. The song celebrates the opportunity to be “alive and breathing”—the chance to whirl around new experiences—as holy gifts. The blistering, seething ”Ticks & Leeches” evokes the depths of the purge even as one emerges from it. “Suck me dry,” Maynard James Keenan hisses as if still addressing the belligerent targets of “Swamp Song” (1993) or "Hooker With A Penis" (1996), as if they neither listened nor learned. “Is this what you wanted? Cause this is what you’re getting.” Damn right; thank goodness. Later, however, within “Lateralis,” the album’s important conceptual and spiritual centerpiece, the narrator achieves a sort of serenity and recognition of the purpose of it all: ”I embrace my desire to/feel the rhythm, to feel connected enough to step aside and weep like a widow/to feel inspired to fathom the power, to witness the beauty.” Perhaps illustrated no more vividly than on this track, Tool display an unmatched, virtuosic command of its oft-abused chosen artistic form: complexly rendered heavy rock music. An Eastern-tinged jazzy sensibility emanates from Adam Jones’s nakedly aching guitar, a beautifully simple little melody that becomes a thick, thunderous curtain of distorted metal. These textures usher in a glorious brain-teasing, multi-metered, sonically layered, vocally wrenching celebration of the intuition, the imagination, the colors between the black and white, the pushing of the envelope (“watch it bend”). Throughout, Keenan’s wrenching lyrics and vocal performances gain great immediacy from Jones’s by turns poetic and atom-smashing guitar work, Justin Chancellor’s grinding, grounding bedrock of bass (consider “Reflection”), and Danny Carey’s athletic, lightning-wristed, jazz-flecked drumming, which sometimes carves out truly tribal moments (consider “The Grudge”). Undertow was a primal shout and a rattling of musical sabres. Ænima consumed the dark side and commenced a painful purging. Lateralus is a slowing, a recovery, a simmering down, a chronicle of one of history’s most serious-minded rock bands at their most humanistic and emotional.

2. Mirwais/Production

In his first album of his own, the Swiss-born, French-based producer Mirwais Ahmadzaï, who famously worked on Madonna’s Music, has created Production, a wild, energetic, unpredictable beast of an album, a bracing clash of Euro-house and techno-pop. Production is interested in production, Production is interested in distortion, and Production is interested in destruction. Woven abundantly within its scientific, experimental realm are sublime melodies; as in any great work, however, the artist makes you work and think for the privilege of hearing them. Mirwais’ whispery French crush talk in the hypnotic “V.I. (The Last Words She Said Before Leaving),“ an early track, reveals much of the album’s overriding objective: an exploration of raw passion, its origins and implications, whether productive or destructive. The insistent, pulsing blips of melody sparkling within the anthemic house jam “I Can’t Wait” suggest the impatience of youth and energy, desperate to be channelled. The bending electro chords suggest the musical effect of what happens when they are. A similar mood, if somewhat lighter, livens “Disco Science,” its pulsing andante streaked with a winking sample of The Breeders’ “Cannonball” and the crackling whine of an insistent synth. The mood is more mechanical on the pleasingly weird “Naive Song” and the bruising “Definitive Beat.” On the former, Mirwais’ filtered vocal recalls the more extreme applications of countrymen Daft Punk, who occupy a more overtly joyous, old-school-funkier electronic world than generally evident here. ”Definitive Beat” establishes a scratchy, rough-and-tumble jungle-industrial clatter that lurches like some big, drunk dude who’s gonna keep dancing even if something breaks. Production elevates itself as it progresses; textures and moods grow deeper and more substantive. Near the album’s climax, undeniable moments of melodic serenity are infiltrated by Mirwais’ science, creating unrest even as things slowly calm. The swell of high strings inside “Never Young Again” wrap around a wicked vocal distortion and dark-techno bump-and-grind, its garble suggestive of a regretful, if not a bitter, looking back. On the emotional, exquisite “Paradise (Not For Me),” not even Madonna, her voice delicate and cinematic, escapes the sculptor’s chisel (the track appears on Music as well). The vocals twist into a digital ribbon suggesting some otherworldly paradise indeed. Finally the burbling, ambient “Involution” wrestles its melting, breathy melody out of a wall of murk and clattering percussion. In the end, Production stands as a brilliant, amazing blend of the wicked and the graceful.

2. Tom McRae/Tom McRae

Some want us to believe that “soft is the new loud.” But the music still has to be interesting for it to have a chance to matter and to touch us. And so we are submitted Travis, David Gray, Coldplay, Starsailor: all of them get where they need to be, at least for now, emphasizing vocal melody and directness and jettisoning pretence. Among them is Englishman Tom McRae, whose songs and deliveries seem potentially the deepest of all. Peered through McRae’s scope, the world looks withery and raw, sort of superficial and undefined; there's a bit much artifice and performance, not enough substance. This rather cynical vista takes definitive residence in Tom McRae, a first collection of observant, razor-sharp, often acid-tongued modern folk songs. Occupying a musical-emotional space where we once could find Art Garfunkel and, in certain moods, Jeff Buckley, and where we now find artists like Gray, the songs are realized with a rich mix of lush percussion, barbed-wire electric guitar, and generous helpings of grit: electric organ, harmonica, strings. A seething tone is set within the stark strains of “You Cut Her Hair,” punctuated by jagged feedback effects and McRae's crackling vocal. A kind of melodic simplicity is perpetrated in the short but active “One More Mile,” but not at the expense of a certain breezy drama. The song moves from a quiet, acoustically enriched beginning, as if truly waiting for the night to pass, to a noisier, more optimistic climax. In the rivetting, intense “Untitled,” one is reminded of the power of simplicity in pop songcraft, that sometimes all we need is a voice and an instrument. Vocalizing the wail of a man desperate to feel—anything, even pain (“Cut it out, rip it out, let me bleed”)—McRae resonates chillingly off the studio walls, evoking the vocally smoother Garfunkel and Buckley, accompanied only by probing, soulful piano (courtesy Howard Jones, long under-appreciated). On an album in which the personal is consistently placed front and center, the ornate, spare, old-fashioned folk noir tune “The Boy With The Bubblegun” tributes and empowers the songwriter, and thus it may be the most autobiographical of all the songs here. The boy is the musician, the weapon the song, the target irrelevant: “I cannot hit to hurt, or cause you pain,/if words could kill...I’d spell out your name.” Perhaps intensity weighs heaviest in the quiet strums of an acoustic guitar.

4. Björk/Vespertine

Intensity and inventiveness. Music boxes. Twisted, gnarled beats sprawled on a thicket of static. Naked emotion. Splashes of vocal glow. These are the moments of Vespertine. The evolution of Björk's music to date tells a fascinating tale, not that everything is perfectly revealed (how interesting would that be?). Here, she is occupying a musical space much of a piece with the very internal, very personal Homogenic and Selmasongs (”Pagan Poetry” delivers a nearly cinematic emotional blow in a manner as witnessed pointedly in the latter) and less in common with the brilliant Post, the sophomore release that represented her first coherent vision. Where Debut and Post exhibitted washes of color and a sometimes truly whimsical humor, the later albums, and Vespertine, principally paint serious, monochromally bleak, roiling, exceedingly intense soundscapes, perhaps reflecting Björk’s progression into her late thirties and her emergence as an important musical figure, perhaps reflecting the stark ruggedness of her native Iceland, whose influence on her compositions appears to be increasing.

Every Björk album grows a kind of rainforest of sound, exemplified vividly here. Bass lines take on the mass of trees, strings rustle like a thick, lazy breeze through liquid leaves, beats crackle like small animals and insects. Burbling electronics, harp, and celeste evoke the permanent humidity created by streams, low light, and trapped moisture. On “Undo” and the brief, impressionistic “Sun In My Mouth,” one can almost smell the music. Many of these tracks reinforce Björk’s commitment to experimental electronic pop forms. The amazing “An Echo, A Stain” combines a primal beat structure, concocted in part by Oregonian beat surgeons Matmos, with a wash of choir and celeste. Music boxes chime and twinkle all over Vespertine, but they are the star on the sprightly, wordless “Frosti,” which works both as a prelude and as a companion piece to “Aurora,” a hymnal ode to nature and sunshine set to lurching herd of jungle beats. The stirring “It’s Not Up To You” best displays Björk’s unique gift: the creation of a perfect pop song from a disparate boxful of weird, amazing, and unlikely noises. What begins with the dark buzz and spatter of an otherworldly beat pattern and murky synth chords, moves through a bright expanse of harps and strings, ending in the glow of a children’s choir. Vespertine does not exhibit the mastery of song structure or the slicing, wicked-cool mood evident within Post, but it does represent Björk’s most varied, most completely realized work since then.

5. Radiohead/Amnesiac

After the groundbreaking explorations in Kid A, in which Radiohead stretched the boundaries of the concept of “rock band” to previously uncharted reaches, Amnesiac followed quickly. As if acknowledging the strangeness of the previous outing, Thom Yorke's immediate vocal tone is that of a man not particularly interested in offering explanations. His spare, ironic words that animate the insular, throbbing “Packt Like Sardines In A Crushd Tin Box” speak plenty: “I’m a reasonable man/Get off my case.” Yorke’s voice, we know, can convey pure, liquid, acidic angst; it can be a creamy suburban croon; it can be a hipster’s urban sneer. The Yorke croon is actually deceptive in its peacefulness on the confronting “You And Whose Army?” It takes on a reedy vulnerability in “I Might Be Wrong,” which rocks steadily propelled by a guitar buzz reminiscent of the totally cranked “Electioneering,” heard on OK Computer. “I used to think,” says the narrator, “there was no future left at all.” “What would I do,” he wonders, “if I did not have you?” A large part of the inventiveness of Radiohead lies in the deployment of its defining voice as an instrument no less than the band’s electric guitars and synths, no less available for some instructive distortion when the song requires it. (Consider “Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors” and “Like Spinning Plates.”) Radiohead nevertheless still are a great rock band, committed to collective achievements, and here, as in Kid A, Radiohead musically are speaking a singular, personal language, pushing tonal and thematic buttons unimaginable by other bands. But in this collection Radiohead are using that occasionally experimental language in the context of much more traditional song forms. Indeed Amnesiac, recorded with a chambered intimacy heard often in great jazz recordings, may be the most musical of Radiohead’s great albums. The slinky ”Knives Out,” with its sinister progressions and subtle strains of dissonance, evokes some of the paranoia of OK Computer while plying a smoothness worthy of a Brubeck. A similar air of cool command radiates from “Dollars & Cents,” with its harrowing washes and bends of strings and guitar, rolling bass textures, and Phil Selway’s persistent ride cymbal. (“Be constructive with yer blues,” Yorke reminds.) An unsettled piano-jazz swirl gives life to the masterful “Pyramid Song,” the album’s most compelling track. Having ruminated on the end of things, swimming in a river with “blackeyed angels,” the narrator finally tells us “there was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt.” Such could be concluded about Radiohead itself in the wake of two beautifully bizarre records for the ages.

6. Plaid/Double Figure

Whatever modern electronic music is—or is supposed to be, in a unsettled world of labels and variations—we’d still like it to make us wiggle a little. But at the same time, electronic music needs to do things that illustrate that it's special, that it does things that other forms don’t, or can’t do, that it takes us places mentally to which other forms have no map. At some point too, electronic music must earn its name: make some sounds we haven’t heard before, which doesn’t have to mean adding vocals. These are the general achievements of Plaid’s third proper album, the burbling, schizophrenic, 19-track, experimental, playful, often pensive Double Figure. The gentle, insinuating “Eyen” opens matters carefully, with a cascade of simple guitar and bass figures before giving way to a buzzing drum program. It is an apt introduction to the first half of the album, wherein Ed Handley and Andy Turner put forth a clambering crush of textures and figures. Prominent here are whip-smart techno-house missiles: the jaggedly melodic “Assault On Precinct Zero,” whose harmonics bounce around as if in a sonic hall of mirrors, the frantic, icily beautiful “New Family,” and the harrowing “Squance,” its sampled gang-vocal touches suggesting a Cold War theme for a new century. These aggressive early tracks coexist with the hushed glow of “Zamami,” in which a smoky jazz-drum figure lends a nostalgic, organic air. As Double Figure moves along, the mood of the tracks becomes subtly more inward and experimental. Throughout the album, more completely realized tracks take shape alongside five amazing little experiments numbered and titled as “Tak”s, none of them longer than a minute. Most appear in the album’s second half. The “Tak”s may well have been a distraction without a point. As deployed, however, they function as crafty little intermissions and mood shifters that allow inter-track diversions and transitions and summon speculations of what might have been. If Double Figure is as a river, these tracks are as eddies and rivulets frothing up and dissipating in an instant, but still essential to the larger rush.

7. R.E.M./Reveal

Once upon a time, not long ago but longer ago than we might have thought, it would have been inconceivable that the musicians called R.E.M., archetypes of timeless rock and roll simplicity, would make a lush, electronically-propulsed song like “I’ve Been High.” The execution of this and similar tracks for Reveal illustrate the continued development of a band whose legacy is well-assured, with whom few would have quarrelled had its remaining members elected to stand down after the departure of drummer Bill Berry. Berry’s presence exerted an underappreciated influence on the sound and mood of R.E.M. for a decade and a half. His retirement seemed to leave the band unsure and melancholy, as exemplified on the somewhat ironically-titled Up. That record emerged as gloomy and rather uneven in its accomplishments; at the same time, many of its pristine compositions hinted at the promise of what this new version of R.E.M. could eventually create when it figured itself out. Reveal achieves where Up fell short because it demonstrates an R.E.M. at last comfortable and confident in its new skin and ready to flourish within it, an R.E.M. older and prepared to investigate things it could not have before.

When considered alongside older work, Reveal most resembles the exquisite Out Of Time (1991), the album that marked the band’s first extensions of, and departures from, its earliest, basic rock forms. The breezy, layered, even jangly “Imitation Of Life” would have proven a welcome companion to the likes of “Texarkana” and “Near Wild Heaven.” Appropriately, Reveal is an album about travelling, journeys, and destinations. Many of these are, of course, symbolic and internal, but a good many are literal and outward. “The Lifting” establishes this tone from the beginning, its mood wide-eyed and confident and encouraging of dreamers, and almost aggressively optimistic. Indeed, in “All The Way To Reno,” painted amidst of a wall of strings and electronic burbles but grounded by Peter Buck’s Eastern-tinged guitar, the subject (who’s “gonna be a star”) has “dusted the non believers” and written her own directions. The weathered “Disappear” evokes both figurative and literal moods. Its lyrics, delivered in a tellingly halting vocal by Michael Stipe, spin a tale of searching and escape (“Tell me why you’re here/I came to disappear”), while its sea-chanty rhythm suggest the arduousness of these labors. One can almost smell the salt. Sometimes the escape requires another world altogether. In the swirling, disquieting, piano-flecked “Saturn Return,” the weary protagonist becomes as the planet, “orbitting nothing,...off on its own, breaking from home.” The themes here remain more internal than were evident in the old days, the arrangements vastly more involved, but again the musicians are in command of the music rather than the other way around.

8. The Strokes/Is This It

Joy Division? Velvet Underground? Ramones? There was a time when short, noisy, guitar-wrought pop songs wound up on the radio—right alongside James Brown and the Turtles. The Strokes make you think back to such a time even as you look forward, grinning at what this band could eventually be, because of the music and nothing more. How cool is that? Great music doesn’t just nudge your sense of sound but also makes you feel a sense of place. The crackle of singer Julian Casablancas’ low-fi, off-the-cuff vocal takes you to a summertime driveway, your big brother’s radio blasting out some rock and roll, car chrome shining through the haze of his cigarette. It’s there when you zoom off going to get burgers. Catch it in the hopped-up jangle and ring of songs like “Someday,” “The Modern Age,” and “Hard To Explain,” all of them fuelled by the guitars of Nick Valensi and Albert Hammond, impossibly assured for ones so young. Music can get you into dark, uncertain places too: sometimes by choice, often not, not always by yourself. The brooding “Alone, Together” and the pining “Is This It” take you back there for a little while, your smile maybe disappearing as you think of it one more damned time.

When rock bands reduce themselves to the basics—the guitar, the bass, the drums, the human wail—all is bared and all is heard. There can be no illusions. Is This It has the special promise of a rock and roll future, because the Strokes are working in a musical currency that is, in essence, a classic form, a basic structure as essential to pop music as the string orchestra is to what we already call classical music. And part of the achievement of this album is that while we can get caught up in the humor and emotion of the songs, and sometimes dance like maniacs, we can also appreciate their fundamental craft. There is true melodic finesse and grace in the interplay and counterpointing of guitars in the title song and the sardonic “Barely Legal,” a genuine improvisational playfulness in Nikolai Fraiture’s crunchy basslines there and elsewhere. Brilliance can come from doing amazing new things never before heard, and brilliance can come from doing basic things better than we’ve heard anybody, or any new artist, do in a long time. It’s why Murmur moved mountains nearly twenty years ago; it’s what makes Is This It special now.

9. Herbie Hancock/Future2Future

Great artists defy genres and labels. Even when placed in those boxes, great artists relentlessly push against the walls—sometimes crumbling them, sometimes forcing them square into the walls of some other musical realm, an artistic invasion. Sometimes the pressure of it all crumbles everything, and all of the walls come down, leaving a pile of inconsequential dust. Future 2 Future represents just the most recent musical bulldozing by one of the world’s greatest musicians, the now 61-year-old Herbie Hancock. Future 2 Future is a roiling, burning ball of influences and legends: meat-and-potatoes jazz on one hand, jazz-jungle-electronica-R&B experiments on the other. ”The Essence” provides the first serious statement. It is a hurtling, amazing, exhilerating blend of live-action drum-and-bass, old-world jazz (Hancock’s mellifluous keyboarding), knowing old-school vocals (Chaka Khan), and slap-happy turntabling. The nervous “Black Gravity” illustrates the album’s motivations further. Hancock presents an amazing trio of instrumentation seldom asked to speak in such a way: Bill Laswell’s crowing bass guitar, A Guy Called Gerald’s playful, jaggedly thick beat program, his own acoustic and electronic noodling. Elsewhere, the smooth and atmospheric vocal jazz of “Be Still,” sung huskily by Imani Uzuri, displays a subdued, soaring grace accented by the restless sax of Wayne Shorter, yet another master. It wouldn’t have made sense for Herbie Hancock to make an “electronica” album—after all, he started making interesting, groundbreaking electronic music at least twenty years ago. Why do what you already figured out long ago? On the other hand, what can we do with jazz forms and electronic forms that elevates both? This is the question that motivates Future 2 Future, resolved—or maybe just addressed and put aside for a while longer—with the touch of a genius.

10. Curve/Gift

There are few singers in rock and roll as authoritative, as direct, or as sexy as Toni Halliday, voice of the venerable London electro-rock duo Curve. Halliday, Slick, Benatar: all have displayed comparable gifts of vocal chill and resonance. In a greater way than its somewhat disorganized predecessor Come Clean (1998), Gift represents a synthesis of the noisy and the lush, of the jagged and the melodic, of gothic doom and sticky romanticism. It is the sort of deep, dark album—treacherous, full of twisted metal, industrial-electronic carnage, and black, goth-dangerous night-noise—that Garbage want to make but don’t have in them to make (yet). Halliday and partner Dean Garcia make their tone clear from the start, with the pounding, blasting “Hell Above The Water” and the techno-pulse of “Gift,” both establishing Halliday’s province. “I’m the one in command,” she sings, and never shall you forget it. Later, ”Chainmail” creeps along like a heavy spider, matching the mood of the brooding narrator, watching “daggers,” waiting “while the night closes in.” Pity the target of those “million stares.” But amidst the aggression we ponder the paradoxes of dark and light. Such conflicts roil in “Hung Up,” the speaker advising “Grieve in love before it’s over/dead by design,” but still wanting to give it one more chance, “hung up on romance.” The theme of regret at things lost, of things irreparably dead but not buried, of fear at what happens after, reaches a climax in the shimmering noise-ballad “Perish.” At its centre sit two people “staying together for the sake of our memories/that we love and cherish” and can’t let down. Kevin Shields of long MIA My Bloody Valentine lends this epic a fresh guitar buzz, engineer Ben Grosse facilitating a razor-wire clear mix here and throughout. Few of the early-Nineties shoegazers remain, or remain relevant. Those of the calibre of Curve, that do, have the substance of their songs, noises, and talent as explanations.

The Rest of the Top 20:

11. Groove Armada/Goodbye Country (Hello Nightclub)

(Three Essential Tracks: “Lazy Moon,” “Superstylin’,” “Fogma”)

12. Faithless/Outrospective

(Three Essential Tracks: “Tarantula,” “One Step Too Far,” “We Come 1”)

13. Orbital/The Altogether

(Three Essential Tracks: “Meltdown,” “Last Thing,” “Illuminate”)

14. Lamb/What Sound

(Three Essential Tracks: “Sweetheart,” “Heaven,” “Gabriel”)

15. Charles Webster/Born On The 24^th Of July

(Three Essential Tracks: “The Gift Of Freedom,” “Forget The Past,” "Fox Soup")

16. Travis/The Invisible Band

(Three Essential Tracks: “Follow The Light,” “Last Train,” “Pipe Dreams”)

17. Daft Punk/Discovery

(Three Essential Tracks: “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger,” “Face To Face,” “One More Time”)

18. Duncan Sheik/Phantom Moon

(Three Essential Tracks: “Mouth On Fire,” “Mr. Chess,” “A Mirror In The Heart”)

19. Sense Field/Tonight And Forever

(Three Essential Tracks: “Fun Never Ends,” “Weight Of The World,” “Here Right Here”)

20. Sloan/Pretty Together

(Three Essential Tracks: “The Life Of A Working Girl,” “The Other Man,” “Pick It Up And Dial It”)

Other Strong Releases (random order): Shawn Colvin/Whole New You; Neil Finn/One Nil; Whistler/Faith In The Morning; Misstress Barbara/Relentless Beats Vol. 1; Our Lady Peace/Spiritual Machines; Live/V; Grant-Lee Phillips/Mobilize; Hana/Omen; Basement Jaxx/Rooty; Suzanne Vega/Songs In Red And Grey; Staind/Break The Cycle; Blake Babies/God Bless The Blake Babies; Craig David/Born To Do It; Depeche Mode/Exciter; Better Than Ezra/Closer; Kristin Hersh/Sunny Border Blue; Powderfinger/Odyssey Number Five; Autour de Lucie/Faux Mouvement; Janet Jackson/All For You; Robert Miles/Organik; Semisonic/All About Chemistry; Troublemakers/Doubts & Convictions; Abandoned Pools/Humanistic; Saint Etienne/Interlude; Joydrop/Viberate; Girls Against Boys/Series 7 Soundtrack; Aria/Haze; Roland Orzabal/Tomcats Screaming Outside; Tricky/Blowback; Überzone/Faith In The Future; The Tender Idols/Distressor; Darwa/More Life More Trouble; Placebo/Black Market Music; Marumari/Supermogadon; Turin Brakes/The Optimist LP; Ivy/Long Distance; John Mellencamp/Cuttin’ Heads; Rebecca Gates/Ruby Series [EP]; Mira/Apart; Garbage/Beautiful Garbage; Stereolab/Sound-Dust; Alana Davis/Fortune Cookies; Zero 7/Simple Things

Glossary of Artists (2001)

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