The Best of 2002

1. Jazzanova/In Between

The emergence of artists like DJ Shadow has awakened the world to the mind-altering power of instrumental hip-hop and sampling. In Between, the debut artist album by the German studio-meisters Jazzanova, raises the bar set most definitively by Shadow’s own debut, Endtroducing. From the beginning, the album seems intent on taking us to a new musical place; each track seems an essential step along the way to this place, a vast sonic workshop in which boundaries are broken down, mutated, transformed, made irrelevant. Though not appearing until track three, “The One-Tet,” MC’ed by rapper Capital A, provides the most apt introduction to Jazzanova and its mission (“This is a party, you’re invited to come...”). Short but brilliant, the verses spell out A’s explanatory rap, while the choruses feature stop-start lyricizing set against a brick-hard piano sample and sampled noise and a sort of lush melodic peace. “Put it there, break it down, let’s go, bring it on, step it up, right there.../Those who want new, that’s our main focus.”

The calling card of Jazzanova, heard previously on many remixes of other artists’ works, is its masterful sampling and collaging. In Between features many truly sublime examples, particularly the tracks “L.O.V.E. And You & I” and “Another New Day.” As the album’s opening track, “L.O.V.E.” sets a high, daunting standard, floating multiple, retro-lounge samples (some of them cheeky in their campiness, illustrating Jazzanova’s not concealed sense of humor), real vibes, and changes of time signature and mood. “Another New Day,” the album’s most moving, rivetting track, and one of the great tracks of 2002, is a masterwork in instrumental hip-hop sampling. Using the introductory “Cyclic” to establish a theme, based on a long-dead piano sample, programmer Stefan Leisering creates a swirling, sophisticated variation propelled by a whirlwind of vocals and, to breathtaking effect, stacked samples of old-school jazz drum-masters like Harvey Mason and Grady Tate, with the main melody carried along by a simple acoustic guitar loop. The drum tracks culminate in an amazing extended percussion break down the center of the song that demands the up-volume. The track finally simmers down in a shower of ancient jazz strings and fluttering flutes.

Jazzanova introduce vocals to the melange elsewhere. Clara Hill’s whispery, willowy, harmonic coo evokes Aaliyah on “No Use,” which slinks along a deep-house groove aided by a wickedly jagged breakbeat clatter. On the appropriately titled “Takes You Back (Unexpected Dub),” Desney Bailey looks back with fondness on a faraway love. Her breathy, old-school-casual stylings juxtapose interestingly against a funky forest of slap-bass funk and ribbons of synth play. The crackling, percolating, frenetic “Mwela, Mwela (Here I Am)” lends the album some Africana, blended primevally well with the album’s basic vibe of nü jazz. Valerie Etienne and Rob Gallagher evoke Flack and Hathaway, lending exquisite coloration to a complex, multi-layered drum-and-bass-fuelled track featuring their polymetric scattershot harmony vocals. Knowing human voices similarly give life to the sauntering “Keep Falling,” knowingly sung/spoken by Philadelphian Ursula Rucker as a cautionary, streetwise intonation against losing the spiritual and one’s freedom, even as we think we’re exalting in it. Her narrator calls on us to save ourselves from those who would feed us “Armageddon sized portions of disaster and pain.” “Use your gift of choice,” she raps, “listen to your own voice,” evoking Marley and “songs of freedom and redemption.” “Hold on, slow down,” she intones—a constant refrain, almost like a mantra.

On ”Hanazono,” Jazzanova make a kind of bubbling jazz fusion. Swirling piano by Hajime Yoshizawa and soaring synths dance a lurching pas de deux over an alternating, but ever-changing, 6/8-5/8 rhythm, their melodies together suggesting something wistfully, even regretfully, remembered. On “Dance The Dance,” gentle synths and percussion tick out a clockwork rhythm against a gentle, delicately probing piano- and synth-driven melody. “We can make a dream come true/in the space of now.” Venerable Detroit jazz drummer Doug Hammond’s vocals are so sweetly flat and meandering, they seem more as spoken words, which would not be out of place anyway. His vocals amble over a sophisticated mingling of drum tracks, ringing mbira, and a gliding synth background. “Why not take a chance/a new way is what it’s all about,” he extols. “Dance The Dance” emerges as a timeless piece unafraid to take its time to establish its almost conversational mood. After seventy minutes of creative explosions, Jazzanova close with the leisurely “Wasted Time.” Another Philadelphian, Viktor Duplaix, who displays a smooth, knowing, unpretentious croon on a track called “Soon,” voices this cool swansong, looking ever brightly ahead: “Don’t know what tomorrow brings/But I’m not going to miss anything/Gonna rise in the morning with the sun/And live each day like it’s my last one.”

Jazzanova’s In Between achieves greatness here; the album bustles with an energy, creativity, and definitiveness of purpose of a sort seldom encountered in modern music, even when it’s good.

2. Wilco/Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

All great music takes you to some other place, often some better, aspired place. Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, the best rock album of 2002, illustrates how great music can take you to places you’ve been and maybe wish you hadn’t, places you sort of regret. You don’t necessarily regret your intentions, just what they led to. Maybe this helps explain why this Illinois rock band, with its nonplussed leader Jeff Tweedy, had such trouble getting this album, a masterpiece of ragged, wistful rock, released: the industry suits didn’t want to think about those places the music took them. Or maybe they’re just idiots.

Wistful regret—sometimes soberly faced, sometimes shunned—runs thematically through many of the songs here. Everywhere, Tweedy’s narrator seems to deliver testimony in confessional mode, to himself if not to others, his mood often displaying a weary, even bemused kind of resignation to choices made now and choices made then, faults and mistakes. Such a mood is established refreshingly early, as on the jaunty “Kamera.” The narrator lenses his mistakes pretty clearly, if grudgingly, as he acknowledges the need for others and their help. He admits, “I need a camera to my eye/...reminding which lies have I been hiding.” He has “driven in the dark” and is frankly “lost.” And “no it’s not o.k.” A similar sense of self-effacement runs through ”Radio Cure.” The song rumbles with an almost melodic bassdrum heartbeat, its body circulating with nervously strummed acoustic guitars, as of blood. It allows a brief glimpse into the dilemma of a man in need of a little help of his own (“There is something wrong with me,” he insists) and who wonders if he can help someone else. “Cheer up,” he says to her, and hopes she can. The plainsong of the verses gives way to a shinier chorus, which reveals the kind of curing he can provide. “My mind is filled with radio cures/electronic surgical words.” These are the elixir for the songwriter, the best he can really do. Try he will, but still “Distance,” which communication through songs fundamentally demands, “has no way of making love understandable.”

Tweedy the songwriter has the deft touch of a poet, able to convey vast images and great depths of feeling with the sparest of words. These achievements emerge on one of the album’s catchiest and most conventionally-structured songs, “Pot Kettle Black”—even the title elementally spare and fragmented, yet all-telling. It paints the tale of a narrator, another torn songwriter, desperate for the work of the road and desperate to stay home. (Dryly he observes: “I myself have found a real rival in myself.” One smiles at the realization, invoked as a one-liner early in the song.) “Empty out your pockets,” he imagines of himself, “words without a song.” You feel him leaving again for the music in the darkness, leaving precious ones behind. “Sleeping eye sockets/baby suck your thumb/I’ll keep you in my locket/a string I never strum.” Once out there, he likens his travels to “lazy locomotives” with no home. But, tough though it may be, he will not complain to himself: “I’m tied in a knot/but I’m not/gonna get caught/calling a pot kettle black.” Such are the classic dilemmas of the songwriter and the family man, the gig and the home—evoked in tunes sung and strum for ages and ages, and never better than here. The similarly literary “Jesus, etc.” evokes elements of human loss transcending the individual. Its subject seems apparent in the infectious chorus, but Tweedy maintains the character of his narrator by wrapping it cleverly around a musical metaphor: “Tall buildings shake/voices escape singing sad sad songs/tuned to chords strung down your cheeks/bitter melodies turning your orbit around.” The song essentially is untitled, the given title merely reflecting the song’s opening line, the narrator’s plea to her, “Jesus, don’t cry/you can rely on me honey.” Later he tells her that “our love is all we have.” The sleeve design of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, recorded in Chicago, features beautiful, simple, clarifying images of that city’s skyscrapers and its defining lakefront. These images, as especially notable in the famous Marina City towers on the cover, seem to provide a quiet tribute to another proud city farther east, its landscape violated.

As a vocalist, Tweedy is above-all uncomplicated, but he changes his delivery in subtle, often sardonic ways to suit the various emotional environments of these songs. He craftily moves from smooth pop singer (“War on War,” “Pot Kettle Black,” “Kamera”) to a bleary-eyed ne’er-do-well (“I Am Trying To Break Your Heart,” “Poor Places”) to a nostalgic kid (“Heavy Metal Drummer”). Wilco consistently create an amazing collage of odd sounds to complement their more conventional song structures, often leading to the maddest concoctions. “Poor Places,” for example, schizophrenically moves from a kind of unwashed vocal dissonance to a homespun acoustic clarity and back to a brazen, noisy, sampled finish. Given these musical tinkerings and the occasional studio debris, many have compared Yankee Hotel Foxtrot to Radiohead’s odd and brilliant Kid A. Wilco create a less outré, more conventional set of songs here, but the comparison is apt. Each album displays a rock band pushing against the apparent barriers of what it has been and emerges in a place neither it, nor its listeners, have previously been.

3. James Hardway/Straight From The Fridge

Sophisticated, wistful, bittersweet are the motions of Straight From The Fridge, the most brilliant album to date by the eclectic English producer David Harrow, aka James Hardway. It is a shining jewel in a year of many exquisite works of avant jazz, soaring and gliding seemlessly, with nary a sonic pause, like a rolling sea. It unfolds like a full day—a full, difficult, brilliant day. On "Happiness Brakes," sunny keyboards and trumpet give the album a buoyant, bouncing start, all full of sprightly flutes and brass and cymbal. Good morning! The bustle begins in earnest as singer JB Rose gives us a ride on the crackling quick "Earth Runnings," taking us swiftly to the road, destination who knows? Savage quick percussion mingles with the glow of otherworldly synths and bassline. But from there the real work begins. The chilling piano and synth interlude "Andrea’s Chimes" acts as a kind of mood transition to the amazing "Dangerblue," a real-life piano jazz-blues sung with knowledge and soul by a man called Floyd Batts, recorded in a Mississippi prison in 1959. Arranged around Hardway’s live production, it is a rivetting slice of musical archaeology and alchemy. Songs such as the unrepentant dance-hall drum-and-bass stomp "Jump Up Natural" and the observant urban ode "Going Home," sung by the brilliant Rose and featuring Hardway’s gutbucket organ, give the center of the album a heat like an afternoon under the sun in a tough city, maybe New York, maybe Sao Paolo, maybe London. The pensive interlude "The Biltmore Piano" ushers in the album’s cooling third act, evoking the simmering down of evening and the eventual dark night. Once the sonic lights fade, Hardway’s sinewy sophistication crystallizes. Vocalist Ghetto Priest, all dub-ified on "Jump Up Natural," dons a crooner’s tuxedo (as if borrowed from the closet of Nat Cole) on the smooth and old-fashioned "Speak Softly." ("See that little house over on the hill/With one candle burning/That’s just the way I feel/I’d just once more like to shine out in the night.") As a sort of midnight approaches, and the various romances of the night inevitably explode or self-immolate (as seems Rose’s creamy lament on the glorious "Can’t Show Love"), the pace quickens a final time, and the bittersweet denizens of the night rush toward a calming shelter before caught by the approaching light. When we hear the tolling bells, restless bass, and cawing synth-horns of "Uptown," one can nearly feel the chaos in that journey home—and it is a long way indeed from the clarion call of "Happiness Brakes" that began this day. In the end Hardway offers a final, calming interlude, "Backward In Time." Its ambient chording creates a cleansing two-minute lullaby for a sonic journeyor who will sleep soundly, exhausted and at the same time defined by this struggle, who will take it on it again and again.

4. Starsailor/Love Is Here

Loss, longing, regret, shame: such subjects motivate the nearly operatic voyages of Starsailor. At the center of the drama is the vocalist James Walsh, whose plaintive wail and croon recall the fallen prince of acid croon, Jeff Buckley. (Indeed the band’s name represents an homage to his father, the late Tim.) Overt emotional drama seldom works consistently in rock and roll. It is terribly difficult to balance the self-absorption that comes with a ripped-open heart with the fundamental aggression that the music will always require. Starsailor succeed here due to Walsh’s sincere talent and because the group's display of a mature cohesion and musical dexterity unexpected in a debut. Walsh’s own intense guitar work and Barry Westhead’s keyboarding particularly stand out. On the mournful “Love Is Here,” their guitars and pianos dominate in the high registers against a shuffling, unhurried rhythm. Walsh sings, somehow ironically, “If you could see the lover in me/And we could join our hands together/You could see how good it could be/We’ll sing these stuipid songs forever/Can you feel it?/Love is here/It has never been so clear...” The rueful, tempestuous ”Fever” slinks soulfully, rolling along on the back of an old-school electric piano. One can almost see the ale on the bar as Walsh confesses it: “Man, I must have been blind/To carry a torch/For most of my life.” ”She Just Wept” demonstrates how the sublime can be found from the simplest forms of musical execution. Carried by a gently swaying 6/8 acoustic guitar figure, the narrator tells again a tale of regret and his own ignorance, as a lover finally melts down. “Those that she loved/She had learned to detest.” The song provides its subject no solutions. In fact, she leaves this place only with a pathetic question unaddressed: “Daddy, I’ve got nothing left/My life is good/My love’s a mess/...What can I do that’s for the best?” While all is open-hearted on Love Is Here, all is not joyless. On the vibrant, roiling, proto-psychedelic “Lullaby,” the narrator tributes an American love and reaches out to her: “If you get high on life, don’t leave me behind.” You feel a narrative desperation there, and a desire to escape the misery captured so vividly elsewhere. In the end the narrator comes perfectly clean on this song: “You live in my ruined mind/Make light of all my fears/And lead me from here.” There is the old-fashioned, bluesy romp of “Talk Her Down,” Westhead’s barroom piano and organ playing a perfect musical foil for Walsh’s wistful vocal. Near the end, Starsailor offer the soaring “Good Souls,” propelled by James Stelfox’s insistent walking bass line and Walsh’s guitars. He sings: “Thank goodness for the good souls/That make life better....One good day of the week/...I’ll be up again...higher than the government.” Released in the UK in October 2001 and in the US in January 2002, Love Is Here unquestionably is the oldest great album of 2002. James Walsh wants the second Starsailor album to convey less misery than Love Is Here, but like his elder countryman Richard Ashcroft, he expresses no interest in abandoning the passion for writing about the grandest subjects in human relationships, whether wrenching or joyous.

5. The Church/After Everything Now This

Atmosphere has been the calling card of the Sydney rock band the Church for over twenty years, sonic environments cultivated by the sonorous, understated guitar playing of the great Marty Willson-Piper and the world-weary-storyteller vocal of Steve Kilbey. The cover of After Everything Now This depicts a sandswept beach leading seamlessly to an endless indigo sea, all immersed beneath a calm shining sky that could be the harbinger of a sunrise or the afterburn of a sunset. This image aptly reflects the beauty and the mystery of the music inside—ten aching, ruggedly melodic rock tone poems. After all of the world, one faces this paradise, but this paradise offers only an infinity. What now?

On the opening signature track “Numbers,” a song most of all about difficult journeys, like journeys of the hunt, Willson-Piper’s guitar sounds a simple repeating open fifth that acts as a clarion for the voyage that follows. As Kilbey counts out the numbers—for whomever and whatever—and as the music crescendoes and hastens, one wonders indeed “what it’s for,” perhaps enumerated prayers? “After everything, now this happens/It’s not a grand illusion, it’s a stupid little trick”: such is the smiling resignation of the erstwhile title track. On the lissome “After Everything,” Willson-Piper’s guitar alternately crying like a banshee and soaring like a searing summer wind, the narrator seems to sing a quiet resignation, a quiet regret for a way of life—possibly even a musical way of life—lost, “now that it’s over.” ”I really thought it would go on forever/Never believed they would sever the ties/All of the questions and maybe an answer/The strangest reflection in a stranger’s eye.” Quiet resignation returns as a theme on the more abstract, more conversational, and less conventional “Invisible,” the album’s beautifully meandering finale which, both lyrically and musically, has the feel of an improvisation. As Willson-Piper’s guitars simmer down, leaving an electronic rumble and a synthesizer’s sunlike glow, we hear the narrator’s last confession: “All I ever wanted to see/Was just invisible to me.”

A kind of weathered spirituality permeates this album, as perhaps would be appropriate given a band named as it is. Often this mood is obscure, other times more apparent. It occupies a central place on one of the album’s most moving and beguiling tracks, “Radiance,” a tale of an encounter with the divine Lady with a “message for mankind.” The swirl of guitars and keyboards adds to the radiance and to the story; their dark development chords evoke the cynicism of the subsequent pilgrimage and circus, which inevitably fades away. Like the story itself, in which “the children never say what the message was...,” the song ends with a kind of wonderment. The envoy to every sonic theme here is Willson-Piper’s guitar, an instrument capable of textures roiling and lyrical at once (the schizophrenic “The Awful Ache,” the sweet and sweeping “Seen It Coming”); it can bend and melt and propulse (see “Reprieve”); it can ring like chimes (“Chromium”); it can smoulder with the pathos of Clapton (“Night Friends”). It is the reason the Church sound like the Church and no other band.

6. Beck/Sea Change

Beck Hansen’s Sea Change is a lush, sweeping orchestral folk-pop masterpiece. Has there ever been such a thing? The album inspires amazement because of its musical achievements and because of its creator. Is this Beck, starring not as the clown or the jester, his “career” roles? Is this Beck, dissatisfied or weary of his forays into those wild meldings—cheesy soul with slacker folk, beachnik hip-hop with greasy funk—that were so entertaining and knowing and creative? Where many artists need to move to the corners to break away, Beck perhaps needed a kind of normalcy—a kind of humanity sporting a new musical voice. Sea Change clearly acts as an apt title for such an outing, given the fairly radical departure that it represents. But the title works another way. Over its dozen tracks, the album, aided principally by Beck’s arching, deep vocal, casts a theme of understated observation, neither angry nor gleeful...nor apathetic. But the songs range musically in a universe of directions, like an unpredictable, sometimes menacing ocean wind, string arrangements acting as the catalyst of their many moods; the two DJs have been supplanted by one conductor. We receive the ambling, strumming downright Austin-thentic sway of “The Golden Age” and the similarly forlorn “Guess I’m Doing Fine,” each sung wide-open and trebulous, in the same place we receive the jazzy and beautifully tense “Round The Bend.” Against an almost sinister maelstrom of bone-chilling strings, punctuated by David Campbell’s upright bass, Beck’s narrator reminds that “We don’t have to worry/Life goes where it goes,” lest we become one of those people pushing “up against themselves.” The sprawling “Paper Tiger” juxtaposes an almost minimalist vocal against similarly roiling strings. Thus, too, do we receive the bright, acoustic ring of “Lost Cause," alongside the equally personal “Lonesome Tears,” wherein Beck’s narrator wails against loneliness alongside still more dramatic orchestral forms, the strings whipping into a cresting frenzy at the end. It subsides into “Lost Cause”—its subject someone who, much to our intrigue, the narrator is “tired of fighting.” One is challenged to imagine these sublime songs on any previous Beck album. Such is the degree to which this artist, or at least the narrators of his songs, “leave[s] the past behind.”

7. Radio 4/Gotham!

With Gotham!, Radio 4 have made the quintessentially urban, urbane, New York rock album. The trio conjure up remembrances of history’s most restless, unceasingly energetic bands: the Clash, the Stones, Primal Scream. Jagger could have written, could have sung these songs thirty-five years ago, and he might have been talking about London; he could dance his wiry bones to them now. Indeed, more than anything else, Gotham! is about energy—the energy of a dance music galvanized by a street/punk spirit, the energy of a summer in the city: ”new electric vibes, take you out for a ride/Our town knows.” These words from “Our Town,” which appropriately opens the album with a jumpy electronic manipulation, a little sonic radio-wave heartbeat that sets the tone for the entire exercise. On “Start A Fire,” the crackling throb of Anthony Roman’s bass evokes a 95-degree midday wind, a sonic incendiary that you can almost smell. “Someone needs to start a fire here,” Roman sings, Jaggeresque. The same restless, frenetic vibe implores those who would to get behind the “Struggle” right now, the talented Tommy Williams’ guitar licks flailing like an acid-drenched rag. Elsewhere, as on “Certain Tragedy,” the pacing facilitates an unexpectedly melodic payoff. Radio 4’s most relentless performances give the album its unstoppable momentum and spine. Consider the buzzing, corroded, impassioned guitar-bass logic of “Save Your City” that allows you to divine an improbable melody out of a wrenching cacophony. Consider the acid-disco swagger of “Eyes Wide Open,” the narrator seeing through false adulation, dreaming with unfooled vision. Consider the militarized, nearly reggaefied wire-brain shuffle of “Red Lights.” When things turn more inward, more haunting, the effect is all the more memorable. This is the accomplishment of “Speaking In Codes,” its narrator observing the despair of an increasingly unknown city desperate for one sort of cure or another (“Drugs all around me/needles and pins”), and “Pipe Bombs,” which meanders around a leisurely bass line, slowly establishing its musical mood, before reaching a techno-punk climax, a hint of the band’s respect for electronic noises as well. The divinely-titled Gotham! becomes the year’s best melding of the eternal forms of rock and roll and dance.

8. Cinematic Orchestra/Every Day

The Cinematic Orchestra’s Every Day, an avant-jazz masterpiece in a year boasting several that would be, exhibits that consistency of mood that great albums often achieve. And although it breaks less new ground than Jazzanova excavate on In Between, which with its sampling mastery and live vocals essentially fashions a new musical language, it is as transfixing a nu-jazz album as has been made. As Every Day begins—with the smouldering, understated “All That You Give”—it is sonically raining. Twinkling showers of percussion mingle with a willowy arpeggiating harp; Phil France’s upright bass provides a gentle kind of distant thunder. And the great St. Louis blues singer Fontella Bass comes clean with it. Cryptically, in the first verse she leaves unfinished sentences: “All that you are...”, “All that you have...”, “All that you give...” How should we finish these? Maybe it’s that they all go away, as in the second verse she reveals. She comes cleaner still: “You hear me raining, raining.../You see me crying/I’m breathing from my hat down to my shoes.” This bluesy, downtempo environ, Every Day establishes from note one and never relinquishes. The effect is rivetting, and the album unfolds like literature, with tales that must be told, and heard, at once; one is dared to put it aside. Notwithstanding the club foundation mastermind Jason Swinscoe and DJ Patrick Carpenter give this band, there can be little doubt about either its technical chops or its fundamentally organic soul and musicality. They achieve a slinky, smoky, reedy groove on “Burn Out,” brought into motion by a persistent, percolating ¾ percussion figure and rhythm. There, France and keyboardist John Ellis share a spotlight. The intensity quickens, along with the pace, on the aptly-titled “Flite.” Guest Milo Fell’s xylophone tolls out a nervous 7/8 allegro, followed in short order by Luke Flowers’ frenetic, intricate, Elvin Jones-like drumplay, the essence of the track. The melody inexorably, lithely winds around the busy bassline and electric guitar. Picture a V of flying birds, shifting, changing, as they soar to heights unknown. The Cinematics trip along almost psychedelically on “The Man With The Movie Camera,” featuring ever-curious keyboard noodling by France and ever-fanciful soprano sax filigrees by Tom Chant. One envisions a filmmaker chasing butterflies and girls around a cityscape—it’s 1965, maybe it’s London or Rome.

Every Day, with tight liner notes by the great British DJ Gilles Peterson, boasts unquantifiable creativity and riches. France evokes the most ornery moments of Mingus with the bass walk that opens the album’s title track, its final track. Carpenter goes a little mental with Bass on the eccentric “Evolution.” The album’s most bracing collaboration and juxtaposition is the emotional, street operatic “All Things To All Men”—the longest, most topically direct track of the seven here. In its opening strains, Chant establishes the basic melodies with his pining saxophones. Flowers’ drumline conjures James Brown more than John Coltrane, befitting the performance of London hip-hop artist Roots Manuva, who streams a knowing, majestic rap of the common man, his narrator “all things to all men/all of the women, all the children.” His rhymes confront tired solutions to old problems, the finding of solutions from within for a change; they confront the debilitating loss of family and of pride (“Be a man, my dad said, but what the hell he know?”). In spirit, Manuva’s rap resembles many eloquent missives from the street that have been with us for at least a generation. But it becomes somehow additionally memorable and stark in this of all musical places, nailed to the elegant trappings of live jazz, finally emphasized by John Ellis’ and Rhodri Davis’ piano and harp epilogue. Encore.

9. Bruce Springsteen/The Rising

There may never have been a more needful time for an album of new material by Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, the collective. We have seen haunting, unforgettable glimpses of Springsteen’s more solitary songwriting; consider Tunnel Of Love or Nebraska. Much of The Rising emerges as a creative response to the outrages of September 2001. It is a testament to this songwriter’s specific craft that this response neither bludgeons nor obsesses, even as it acknowledges the taste for revenge; but the statements here likely could not have resounded as memorably, as effectively, had they come from a single voice. Ultimately, The Rising illustrates not just an amazing optimism and hope but also how those emotions can come from absolute nothingness when there is support in numbers. In light of the album’s background and underlying motivation, there may have been no more perfect opening track—or track generally—on any album in 2002 than the brilliant, rousing, defiantly hopeful “Lonesome Day,” surely destined to be one of Springsteen’s signature songs. Its narrator is as conflicted as a man could be. He longs for that “tender touch” even as he fights off a “dark sun” on the rise, a house afire, and a taste for vengeance (but “this too shall pass,” he prays). He warns against an impulsive anger, a “bitter fruit...hard to swallow.” But these waves of feeling prove no match for his optimism: the storm will blow through “by and by” and he will find his way through the loneliest of days. “It’s all right” indeed. Max Weinberg wails and pounds drums behind a rave-up of bluesy guitars, Danny Federici’s soulful organ, and the band’s cascade of backing vocals. This song accompanies thematically many of this sort. Though far from the most important creative achievements here, the marching, defiant ”Into The Fire” nevertheless is the spiritual centerpiece of this album and perhaps the most overt ode to the dead and unforgotten, a paean to all who faced the fire on that day and never returned. The narrator laments “I need your kiss, but love/and duty called/you someplace higher.” The simplicity of the song’s structure works in the context of its very hymnlike refrain: “May your strength give us strength/May your faith give us faith/May your hope give us hope/May your love give us love.” The similarly galvanizing title track alternates between an roiling synth melody that whispers uncertainty and pure, wide-open feeling, captured in its infectious “Li, Li, Li” choruses and solidified by Weinberg’s thunderous drumming. Other songs make understated tributes to those who remain in the aftermath of loss. Consider the lost narrator who is the “Nothing Man,” his life changed “in a misty cloud of pink vapor.” Or the more viscerally tormented figure of “Empty Sky,” who wants “an eye for an eye,” the clueless father in “You’re Missing.” Like most great songwriters, and as in previous songs, Springsteen makes songs here about subject A while lensing them through subject B, at the same time creating indelible characters to inhabit his exquisite streetside melodies. The result is ever-powerful, thought-provoking, literate.

10. Felix da Housecat/Kittenz And Thee Glitz

Long a sought-after DJ and remixer, Chicago's Felix Stallings Jr., aka Felix da Housecat, establishes himself as a musician and composer of staggering creativity and heart on Kittenz And The Glitz—not to mention quite the house-music impresario. The album is an amazing blend of pure unadulterated fun, techno-funk nostalgia, and meticulous musicianship, all founded on key, often serendipitous, collaborations. Stallings’ compositions give the album a skeleton; vocalists Melistar, Miss Kittin, and Harrison Crump give it a soul. The first time we hear the sweet Swiss Miss Kittin, she’s leaving Felix an invitation to jam, Euro-style, on his machine, and in that champagne-glam voice. She contributes a kind of two-track spoken/vocal set-piece with “Madame Hollywood” and “Silver Screen Shower Scene.” The first, a quick, tight dancer, evokes bright hot LA afternoons and azure pools adorned with babes in bikinis holding filtered cigarettes. It acts as kind of an overture to the more wicked, noise-inflected throb of “Shower Scene,” evoking a dead-of-night limousine ride headlong into splash and glamour. Together Kittin and Felix sound the words—nearly as an incantation—which effectively set the tone of the entire carnival of an album: “Hear the music, say the word, see the light, join the herd/Love it comes, love it goes, diamond memories, go with the flow.” Upon entering the Melistar-voiced “Happy Hour,” it could be 1983 again. A loping, buzzing synth bass line wraps around a spray of chords A Flock of Seagulls might have programmed, eagerly. The hookline makes this nostalgic message quite clear, giving a nod to some of the stalwart machinery of the jam (“Happy hour, sunshower, 808s: gives you power”). Itchy, sizzling synths on the opening “Harlot,” also sung by Melistar, all sexily detached and melodious, give the album an appropriately frenetic start. Where the ladies provide the album’s most joyous, most luxuriant, and most humorous moments in its first half, Stallings’ alterego “Electrikboy” inhabits the album’s darker second half. On “Walk With Me,” his altered voice beckons as a disembodied spectre (“Take my hand, walk with me”). His synths lend an industrial flavor to the pure techno of “Glitz Rock.” His moog bass and piano leaven the soaring “Sequel2Sub,” a work of synthetic beauty recalling some of the best wordless moments of Nine Inch Nails. “Magic Fly” and “She Lives” display a melodic whimsy and steadfast propulsion heard in great film music. (Could films become a future medium for this Housecat?) And for a brief moment, the brooding, buzzing “Analog City” creates a complete new world. This wild ride that is Kittenz And Thee Glitz comes to an end with its most precious, perhaps most sincere stroke, the irresistible “Runaway Dreamer,” sung by Crump and featuring Stallings’ brilliant, supple keyboarding and arrangements.

The Rest of the Top 20:

11. Girls Against Boys/You Can't Fight What You Can't See

(Three Essential Tracks: "Tweaker," "BFF," "Resonance")

12. Nuspirit Helsinki/Nuspirit Helsinki

(Three Essential Tracks: "Subzero," "Seis Por Ocho," "Trying")

13. Recloose/Cardiology

(Three Essential Tracks: "Kapiti Dream," "Procession," "Up And Up")

14. DJ Shadow/The Private Press

(Three Essential Tracks: "You Can't Go Home Again," "Six Days," "Monosylabik")

15. Coldplay/A Rush Of Blood To The Head

(Three Essential Tracks: "A Whisper," "A Rush Of Blood To The Head," "Clocks")

16. Doves/The Last Broadcast

(Three Essential Tracks: "M62 Song," "N.Y.," "Pounding")

17. Kosheen/Resist

(Three Essential Tracks: "Hungry," "Face In The Crowd," "I Want It All")

18. Sleater-Kinney/One Beat

(Three Essential Tracks: "Combat Rock," "Oh!," "One Beat")

19. Meshell Ndegeocello/Cookie: The Anthropological Mixtape

(Three Essential Tracks: "Jabril," "Hot Night," "Akel Dama (Field Of Blood)")

20. Injected/Burn It Black

(Three Essential Tracks: "Bullet," "I-IV-V," "Faithless")

Other Strong Releases (random order): St. Germain/Boulevard; Pearl Jam/Riot Act; Miguel Graça/Monkey Mass; Lemon Jelly/Lost Horizons; Beth Orton/Daybreaker; VNV Nation/Futureperfect; Lewis/Even So; Sasha/Airdrawndagger; Tori Amos/Scarlet’s Walk; Phonosynthese/Lebensstrom; Underworld/A Hundred Days Off; Tahiti 80/Wallpaper For The Soul; Goudie/Effects Of Madness; Sonic Youth/Murray Street; David Bowie/Heathen; Loudermilk/The Red Record; The Exit/New Beat; Lusine icl/Iron City; Elbow/Asleep In The Back; The Tragically Hip/In Violet Light; Our Lady Peace/Gravity; The Timewriter/Diary Of A Lonely Sailor; Kyoto Jazz Massive/Spirit Of The Sun; The Baldwin Brothers/Cooking With Lasers; Aim/Hinterland; Andrew Pekler/Station To Station; Peter Gabriel/Up; Duncan Sheik/Daylight; Thievery Corporation/The Richest Man In Babylon; Saint Etienne/Finisterre; Deadsy/Commencement; Gretchen Lieberum/Brand New Morning; Mr. Gone/Fresh Out The Box; Röyksopp/Melody A.M.; Gus Gus/Attention; Capitol K/Island Row; Aimee Mann/Lost In Space; Vanessa Carlton/Be Not Nobody; Pulse Ultra/Headspace; Morcheeba/Charango; Balligomingo/Beneath The Surface; Grant-Lee Phillips/Ladies’ Love Oracle; Pieter K/Everything All The Time; Club 8/Spring Came, Rain Fell; Sarah Shannon/Sarah Shannon; Yagya/Rhythm Of Snow; The Rocking Horse Winner/Horizon; The Goo Goo Dolls/Gutterflower; Deepsky/In Silico; Zenith:Nadir/Wonderful Things; Audioslave/Audioslave; Matthew/Everybody Down; Dream Theater/Six Degrees Of Inner Turbulence; Dzihan & Kamien/Gran Riserva; Midnight Oil/Capricornia; Chevelle/Wonder What’s Next; Oasis/Heathen Chemistry; Bonnie Raitt/Silver Lining; The Mooney Suzuki/Electric Sweat; The Reputation/The Reputation; Roni Size/Touching Down; Cassius/Au Reve; Vex Red/Start With A Strong And Persistent Desire; Nonpoint/Development; Jerry Cantrell/Degradation Trip; Local H/Here Comes The Zoo; David Gray/A New Day At Midnight; Tanya Donelly/Beautysleep; Mull Historical Society/Loss; Sheryl Crow/C’mon, C’mon; Blue Six/Beautiful Tomorrow; Tarwater/Dwellers On The Threshold; Dishwalla/Opaline; Neil Young/Are You Passionate?; Anna Waronker/Anna By Anna Waronker; The Chemical Brothers/Come With Us; Canu/Corriente de Aire; Rinôçerôse/Music Kills Me; Ils/Soul Trader; Rush/Vapor Trails

Glossary of Artists (2002)

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