The Best of 2003

1. Nada Surf/Let Go

There is nothing obviously great about Let Go, the third and most accomplished album by Matthew Caws' Long Island rock trio Nada Surf. No strange noises bent into interesting melodies. No unlikely hybrids of musical styles or genres. No particular manifestos. Only brilliant songs, displaying a depth of mood, maturity, and literacy that belies their very straightforward delivery. Melancholy—or its consequences—motivates the existence of many, if not all, of these songs, perhaps most centrally in the confessional "Blizzard Of ‘77," the album’s first, shortest, and ultimately most essential track. For it sets the tone for all that follows, perhaps representing a lowest point from which the remainder can act as a kind of elevating therapy. Taking wing from an insistent acoustic strum, the narrator seems to recall that long-ago winter almost as an example of the weather in his heart and mind now. "I miss you more than I knew," he realizes. The time and place, or someone with whom they were shared?

Throughout, Let Go ponders sometimes cold and almost always lonely nights spent in bars and in beds—awake, asleep, or someplace in between. It’s about doing too much thinking and perhaps too much dreaming in these various places, and how we can end up laughing out loud at the exercise. For Caws’ narrator on the shimmering "Inside Of Love," it’s about "watching terrible TV" in those places, which "kills all thought," and "making out with people I hardly know or like." (But, then, he "just had a bad night.") His mood and attentions turn more cosmic when considering that place between consciousness and oblivion, on the mesmerizing "Neither Heaven Nor Space." In an inevitable quiet, one’s attentions are "just high/and the ring around the moon/looks like light and love/neither of which I get enough of...down there." Caws’ narrators turn downright whimsical in their more brightened, sober, or physically-aware moments—by turns a "Happy Kid" with the "heart of a sad punk" or a mellow yet defiant urban fool in the rain, ambling along the crowded avenue with "Blonde On Blonde" (of all possible wild, literate things) on his walkman, just about all any kid, happy or otherwise, would need to get by, really.

Greatness in rock can emerge when musicians devise apt blends of the lyrical, the musical, and the thematic and move you (or perhaps your head, or your feet) at the same time. The brilliant "Fruit Fly" represents one such moment on Let Go, epitomizing in content, in form, and in execution the theme of emotional uncertainty present throughout this entire work. The song begins with a delicate, low-register acoustic melody framing a mundane little tale about a tired man, his forlorn food, and the fruit flies it attracts; the narrator even apologises that (perhaps like himself) they’ve "got nowhere to go." If these spare opening moments symbolize the torpor of the narrator, the more cacophonous remainder of the song takes on the character of those frenetic flies, as the tempo quickens and darts and the bright melodies crescendo. The narrator’s panting, almost exasperated expression evokes his own directionlessness and that of the flies: "Left straight right straight/I can’t find a reason/I know I’ll keep going but/I can’t find a reason/Nothing looks right nothing smells right/I can’t land..." But finally, "What can you do but go on?" And the band plays on. Later, the rollicking single "Hi-Speed Soul" sounds like the masterful song The Cars never quite wrote. Propelled by a smashingly relentless electric-guitar melody, a background of cascading keyboards, and a chorus from the gods, the song imagines those things we might do, have always done, to escape these various frustrations of day and night and the pervasive uncertainty they breed: play our music, shake our speakers, do our dances. "Do you ever feel like you just landed on this earth?" the narrator begins, keen on pretending "it’s another planet not so uptight." But ultimately, after the narrator’s friends have "all left," the hour has grown too late, and he just wants to get away. The key has turned minor; the mood and tempo, once energetic, have turned desperate. Appropriately, it ends not with a fade but with a cut.

The accomplishments of Let Go come only as a small surprise, given Nada Surf's history. Many who remember this band likely remember them for their ubiquitous, ironically titled, scarily catchy MTV hit "Popular," from High/Low (1996). But deeper listening of that album and the band’s swirling sophomore release The Proximity Effect would have revealed the potential for more transcendent, thoughtful things, as in evidence here.

2. Jane’s Addiction/Strays

Jane’s Addiction’s Strays, the band’s first proper album since the landmark Ritual de lo Habitual (1990), is an exercise in attitude and swagger, theatrical command and aggressive instrumental energy. This is the way that dormant rock bands should come back, if they come back. Don’t come back until you have something to say—and then don’t just say it, blast it.

Jane's have brought the house: every element that we always heard from this band, and which marks them as unique and memorable, shows up on Strays. Sly arrangements; opportunities to get bluesy and to boogie down; that sense of the progressive and that left-turn inventiveness; that bright awareness of real people, sometimes freakish but always tough, in a town (L.A.) full of unreal ones; that dark sense of humor—all of it held together with that tight, cohesive musicianship.

Part of the particular genius of Jane's Addiction has always been crafting songs which become almost instant calling cards; Dave Navarro’s brilliantly versatile guitaring and vocalist Perry Farrell’s distinctive wail contribute greatly to this skill. It doesn’t matter where you are, alone or in a crowd, you know instantly that "Stop" or "Mountain Song" is on. Several of the songs here are destined for this sort of knowing as well. The opener "True Nature" ("Here we go!" Farrell shouts, just as before...), for example, marks its territory forever with an electro-mechanical squawk that opens the crashing, slide-guitar-tinged condemnation of wolves in sheep's clothing.

The greatest songs on Strays display not only those key elements of great Jane’s Addiction songs but also display the band members at their most prodigious. Consider the ironically glorious, sprawling "Price I Pay." Backed by a gentle electric-guitar melody and the wash of a synth choir, Farrell sings a confessional appropriate for many of the songs he has spun as his life’s work: "I always do the wrong thing/But for a very good reason/...Forgive me now." But, no, the song is not really self-indulgent. This Farrell narrator knows perfectly well that his wrong things don’t come for free, and as his humble ecclesiastical reverie fades, the church music morphs into an urgent rock tale of indulgence and overconfidence, ushered in by Chris Chaney’s foreboding acid-funk bass line and Navarro’s alternately crunching and lyrical guitaring. Deep in it, the narrator admits dreadfully, "I’m layin in bath of hot water/Hot water always my case." As the music grinds to closure in a perfectly appropriate gospel stomp in 3/4 time, Farrell finally grits his teeth and testifies, downright Plantlike, about paying that final price. Later, Navarro shows his considerable Memphis, big-muddy-river chops on a couple of bluesy, strutful raveups. "The Riches," a celebration of them, features Farrell in fine lascivious form ("Like my woman like the shower—get them hot until they’re steaming"), but the song is cleverer than we initially realize, for this mad search for one sort of riches has left this narrator ignorant of simpler rewards. As the song sways to a peaceful close, he celebrates the sun, the sky, the snow, and the air. Ahh...These are the riches! On the blazing jam "Suffer Some" (a title certainly worthy of the blues), Jane’s Addiction make their way back to the inner city to tell the tale of one of those denizens who "drink and slum." As she, yeah, suffers some, Navarro channels the narrator’s disdain and the subject’s pain into a scorching, dirt-bag set of guitar fills and a solo that echoes the all-time greats. And...you can dance.

In an earlier era, Jane’s Addiction helped create a rich soundtrack for a generation of music fans who embraced a little bit of madness and a little bit of shock in their rock and roll. At some point, it seemed absurd that there would ever be new music from this band, and Farrell's Porno For Pyros could never have filled the void, hard as it worked—one might as well have asked for new Stone Roses or My Bloody Valentine (as I suppose we do). If Strays proves anything, it proves that patience pays off and that a truly great rock band always has more.

3. Radiohead/Hail To The Thief

4. Massive Attack/100th Window

In the time since the deep, beautiful, and multi-layered Mezzanine (1998), Bristol’s greatest musical innovators Massive Attack have endured the departure of the soulful Andrew Vowles, known as Mushroom, and a sort of fatherhood-induced sabbatical by the cerebral Grant Marshall, known as Daddy G, leaving the shop to the brooding Robert Del Naja, known as 3-D. The resulting fourth Massive Attack album, while as transfixing as any before it, becomes, not surprisingly, a uniquely solitary work, a work of unencumbered ambience, impressionism, and meditation. In this vein, Del Naja leaves much of the music here open-ended, critics might say unfinished. But the nine tracks on 100th Window are largely songs about ideas, thoughts out loud rather than, say, complete stories. As such, they reach few, if any, conclusions; Del Naja leaves these to the listener. They often begin as thoughts themselves begin, meaning sometimes with turmoil, and end as thoughts end, meaning sometimes interrupted by other thoughts.

In some ways, the music itself evoke human thought processes, their often unstructured transcience. The opening track "Future Proof" begins with a sequence of electronic beeps and burbles, as if echoing the awakening of the mind from a night's sleep, leading to a sinuous guitar melody and throbbing little footprints of beats that evoke the new flow of the blood and the new beat of the heart. Similarly, the great "Butterfly Caught," an ominous, meditative piece, at first beckons the listener to a dreamlike corridor of synth drone and 3-D's eerie, treated Siren's chant. It then snares, gains propulsion from an old-school techno beat program and flight from soaring waves of violins. 3-D’s vocals unfold in pieces and phases, creating the illusion that every line is sung in its own time and space—a kind of musical stained glass, with as much mystery—and that he is singing a duet with himself.

No Massive Attack album belongs to a single voice, nor does every mood on 100th Window represent pure abstraction. If Del Naja's vocals guide us into the darkness, the songs voiced by Sinéad O’Connor and the ever-present and ever-essential Horace Andy take us to the light. "What Your Soul Sings," the first of the O’Connor tracks, speaks of honesty and self-esteem, the conquering of fear, the finding of peace within oneself. Like the best of O'Connor's own songs, it shows a great delicacy of feeling ("make your choice joy") at the same it displays a quiet sense of strength, symbolized sonically by the gorgeous blending of floating synth strings and wailing guitar feedback. Andy voices "Everywhen," a literal "incantation" about time and timelessness. Whether it’s love, light, knowlege (or at least "everything you think you know"), or blood ties, it is a cycle—it will come and it will go, "the sequence ends and begins." Probing similar territory, "Name Taken," also voiced by Andy, considers the passage of time, the fading of innocence, the iciness of the experience. One of the last tracks here, "Small Time Shot Away," is one of the album's most melodic and subtly political. At the start, a few measures of deceptively innocent music-box flickerings combust to an undeniably mature, hypnotic loop of synth flame, burning not to destroy but to pacify. "It’s wartime everytime," Del Naja laments in a sometimes electronically-fractured vocal, and this becomes a song about drowning out that pain, drowning out that feeling, finding that right partner and that right drug, that right "shot"—if they’re not all the same thing—that will make it all go numb.

The passage of time. The elusiveness of happiness. The frustration of conflict and war. Such issues ever occupy the philosophers because they cannot ever be resolved, only made clearer by scrutiny. Seldom does pop music venture directly into such territory.

5. London Elektricity/Billion Dollar Gravy

When it comes to achieving musical greatness, especially in electronica, the drum-and-bass community has a fair amount to overcome, albeit constraints of their own making. By design, drum-and-bass artists are interested in exploring only part of the spectrum, finding melody and coloration only within the confines of a bass guitar, a double bass, or their synthesized equivalents. Where drum-and-bass artists have struggled over the years, they’ve struggled to find some kind of soul inside that rigid sonic skeleton and the sometimes incomprehensibly fast beats at its foundation. But just like the great cinematographers found infinite shades of grey in black and white film, finding ways to tell visual stories while they peered through the shadows, the greatest drum-and-bass producers have found soul in the human voice, whether singing or speaking. These were the achievements of Roni Size’s New Forms, and they are the achievements of London Elektricity's Billion Dollar Gravy, the most affecting piece of electronica of 2003.

The brilliance, much as it ever was, lies in the collaboration. While Tony Colman supplies the vision and energy for the tracks here, and The Jungle Drummer supplies the eternal beats, the album’s guest vocalists transform the tracks from what would have been mere studio exercise to pieces of beauty. Regarded literally, "Different Drum" seems a sombre soliloquy, a prelude to death. Against a busy yet attentive musical clatter—a workably speedy drumtrack, a tender piano, soaring brass, sharp strings—earnest vocalist Robert Owens tells a tale of a man tired of the ordinary, standing at a great height, ready to take that final step. But viewed another way, "Different Drum" emerges as a clever meditation on the musical form it inhabits, a call to break away from what becomes pedestrian and ordinary in drum-and-bass: "Bit by bit we will overcome/I want to dance to the beat of a different drum." In the end, the track works as a transcendent piece of modern R&B and as a pure branch of studio lightning. Owens shines again on the similarly-themed but more jungle-leaning (and less dire) "My Dreams."

Owens shares the vocal spotlight on this album. For example, longtime LE muse Liane Carroll uses her smoky voice not only for lyricism but also as an effective melodic drapery. The sassy, cool "Main Ingredient," co-written by Carroll, acts as both a warning and an enticement for anyone who might seek to enjoy her company. In the sly chorus, Carroll tells him, "I can’t predict the end result of my love/If you’re assuming there’s a silky sweet ending/I’m not exactly what it says on the tin." Carroll even scats a bit on the dizzying, joyful "Fast Soul Music," a future classic for darkened dance floors and sports cars. Jungle vocalist MC Darrison peppers "The Great Drum + Bass Swindle," the album’s moodiest, most atmospheric track. Here Colman, sampling a bit of swank from Ennio Morricone, the master of mood, conceives a swirling, complex sonic murk-world: live drums, voices filtered and treated, bent synth melodies.

Elsewhere, the instrumental pieces on Bilion Dollar Gravy—remarkable in their inventiveness, musicality, and sense of fun—solidify the album as a complete drum-and-bass work. The opening title track flies along with a jazzy, observant determination, its wispy two-tone synth-flute melody carried along as if on the wind through which it slices and cuts. The whimsical "Cum Dancing" offers a twee recurring theme fit for creaky music boxes, gradually varying into textures more sweeping and ominous and even grindingly dark. "Harlesden" manages to weave an unlikely chorus of lounge brass onto a grid of beats and fluttering bass.

As electronic music goes, drum-and-bass stimulates the mind as much as it stimulates the feet or the heart; the rigidity of its forms invites introspection and concentration from the listener. But when it fails to inspire, the result can become downright painful, as often things become too clinical, the artist too concerned with beats per minute. Billion Dollar Gravy stands as one of the best drum-and-bass albums ever made because it manages to find some soul and passion in between the wires and circuits.

6. The Fire Theft/The Fire Theft

The Fire Theft, titled for the new Seattle trio comprising most of the beloved but inconsistent quartet Sunny Day Real Estate, paints on a canvas as big as the night’s sky. Its arrangements, structures, and mood swings as much recall the three-hour opera as the three-minute pop song. All of the elements of the classics—classic theatre, classic rock, classic literary themes—are on display here. Dramas of introspection. Passion and bold declarations of love. Vast dreams of heaven and sobering bolts of reality. But if The Fire Theft is to be operatic, it is not to be tragic; ultimately, it is one of the most positive-thinking, forward-looking albums of the 2003. "Why hide in the rain/when you can grab hold of love if you want it," leader Jeremy Enigk sings, not without irony, on the mercurial and sprawling "It’s Over." That song as much as any demonstrates the album’s greatest single virtue: in the same motion that The Fire Theft flashes winsome, even old-fashioned, charms, it also seismically rocks.

It’s very difficult to rock compellingly in triple metre, 3/4 or 6/8 time; we know this. Such metres convey delicacy and elegance, the way of the waltz, where rock and roll thrives on indelicacy and inelegance, straightforwardness, the way of the hip-shake. If it’s going to work, the lay of the melody and the power and substance of the presentation must make up for otherwise counterintuitive beats. Four of the ten tracks on The Fire Theft which feature vocals ford this musical sea and occupy the very heart of the album, with transcendent results. "Chain," Enigk’s soulful, defining testimony of hope against a violent world, uncoils quietly enough—with a choir of cellos and synths—but then, as the passion and frustration build (as "words form some kind of silence/When the world falls into violence"), Enigk’s guitar crescendos, offering a tearing and howling accompaniment to his vocal wail. On the breezy "Summertime," a meditation on that season as a kind of heaven ("which way to the stars [?]")—made whimsical with charming touches of synths, clarinet, and other winds—the swaying rhythm rocks the listener perhaps in a more literal way. One requires a joyful cup of mead or ale to hold aloft. "Houses" delights and enchants in a similar way. It is a chronicle of a dream about dreaming ("nevermind the world when I’m laying by the pool"), of the "perfect life" and all of the houses one could build inside of it, and all of the minds those houses could hold, and the eternal holiday of such a scene. The brilliant and dynamic "Heaven," framed around a piano-flecked, McCartneyesque melody, like most every song about heaven, questions just how easy it is it might be to find that elusive space and whether it might just be about—what do you know?—"falling in love."

However long the Fire Theft continue—one feels it necessary to be guarded, given the comings and goings of SDRE—this debut will be remembered for three essential things: its ambitious sonic and lyrical sweep, its ingenious melodies and progressions, and Enigk’s sometimes pathetic, sometimes commanding, sometimes self-ironic vocals, the drama of his phrasings so reminiscent of the performances of Roger Waters. But on the basis of The Fire Theft, we have great acts of the drama left to look forward to.

7. Clatter/Blinded By Vision

8. Idlewild/The Remote Part

9. Groove Armada/Love Box

10. Clue To Kalo/Come Here When You Sleepwalk

The Rest of the Top 20:

11. Cave In/Antenna

(Three Essential Tracks: "Seafrost," "Inspire," "Penny Racer")

12. Zwan/Mary Star Of The Sea

(Three Essential Tracks: "El Sol," "Settle Down," "Yeah!")

13. Tipper/Surrounded

(Three Essential Tracks: "Forty Winks," "Just As The Sun Went Down," "Screw Loose")

14. Tosca/Delhi 9

(Three Essential Tracks: "Wonderful," "Dave Dudley," "Oscar")

15. Slowride/Building A Building

(Three Essential Tracks: "Panther 2," "Track 13," "Smoke Cigarettes")

16. Rainer Maria/Long Knives Drawn

(Three Essential Tracks: "Ears Ring," "The Double Life," "The Awful Truth Of Loving")

17. The Strokes/Room On Fire

(Three Essential Tracks: "Reptilia," "The End Has No End," "Meet Me In The Bathroom")

18. Travis/12 Memories

(Three Essential Tracks: "Walking Down The Hill," "Re-Offender," "Love Will Come Through")

19. Meshell Ndegeocello/Comfort Woman

(Three Essential Tracks: "Come Smoke My Herb," "Andromeda & The Milky Way," "Liliquoi Moon")

20. Yellowcard/Ocean Avenue

(Three Essential Tracks: "Ocean Avenue," "Believe," "Inside Out")

Other Strong Releases (random order): The Stills/Logic Will Break Your Heart; Year Of The Rabbit/Year Of The Rabbit; Apparat/Duplex; Kenna/New Sacred Cow; Sloan/Action Pact; Broadcast/Haha Sound; A Perfect Circle/Thirteenth Step; Ellen Allien/Berlinette; Dinky/Black Cabaret; The Exies/Inertia; Adam Johnson/Chigliak; Alton Miller/Stories From Bohemia; Living Colour/CollideØscope; Dashboard Confessional/A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar; Kathleen Edwards/Failer; Broken Social Scene/You Forgot It In People; Turin Brakes/Ether Song; Rithma/Music Fiction; Appliance/Are You Earthed?; Plaid/Spokes; BT/Emotional Technology; Alexander Kowalski/Response; The Lithium Project/Many Worlds Theory; Midwest Product/World Series Of Love; Zeromancer/Clone Your Lover; Tom McRae/Just Like Blood; Paul van Dyk/Reflections; Paloalto/Heroes And Villains; Steely Dan/Everything Must Go; Haley Bonar/The Size Of Planets; Slowpho/Hotel Sleep; The Pleased/Don’t Make Things; Sarah McLachlan/Afterglow; Trüby Trio/Elevator Music; Rachel’s/Systems/Layers; Park/It Won’t Snow Where You’re Going; H_Foundation/Environments; Agent K/Feed The Cat; The Innocence Mission/Befriended; The New Amsterdams/Worse For The Wear; Longwave/The Strangest Things; The Notwist/Neon Golden; Georg Levin/Can’t Hold Back; Sting/Sacred Love; Kevin Devine/Make The Clocks Move; Tricky/Vulnerable; Fleetwood Mac/Say You Will; Daniel Magg/Facets; John Mellencamp/Trouble No More; Neil Young/Greendale; Stereophonics/You Gotta Go There To Come Back; South/With The Tides; Firewater/The Man On The Burning Tightrope; Leona Naess/Leona Naess; Four Tet/Rounds; Stars/Heart; 808 State/Outpost Transmission; Antenne/#2; Bleu/Redhead; Metric/Old World Underground, Where Are You Now?; Evanescence/Fallen; Cibelle/Six Degrees; Annie Lennox/Bare; Detalles/Shapes Of Summer; Bettie Serveert/Log 22; Third Eye Blind/Out Of The Vein; Seal/Seal IV; Richard Ashcroft/Human Conditions; Manitoba/Up In Flames; OSI/Office Of Strategic Influence; Steadman/Revive; Imitation Electric Piano/Trinity Neon; Basement Jaxx/Kish Kash; Dave Gahan/Paper Monsters; Mae/Destination: Beautiful; Sense Field/Living Outside; Revis/Places For Breathing; Live/Birds Of Pray; Placebo/Sleeping With Ghosts; Gemma Hayes/Night On My Side; The Sea And Cake/One Bedroom; Anberlin/Blueprints For The Black Market; Metallica/St. Anger; Via Tania/Under A Different Sky; Lowfish/1000 Corrections Per Second; Helicopter Helicopter/Wild Dogs With X-Ray Eyes; Some Girls/Feel It; Aphrohead/Thee Underground Made Me Do It; Slow Coming Day/Farewell To The Familiar; The Cinematic Orchestra/Man With A Movie Camera; Kristin Hersh/The Grotto; Throwing Muses/Throwing Muses; Further Seems Forever/How To Start A Fire; Fiction Plane/Everything Will Never Be OK; Mull Historical Society/Us; Celebrity/Lovesick; The Rum Diary/Poisons That Save Lives; David Bowie/Reality

Glossary of Artists (2003)

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