2001 Retrospectacle
by Marc Hirsh

As has been mentioned many, many times before, it's easy to stick to your principles when they're not being challenged. So I find in coming up with this year's list, as two rules that I have staunchly defended but never had to test come under the gun simultaneously. We start with the fact that I've always found it silly that some folks publish their year-end best-of issues in the first week of December, thus missing an entire month or more of the year that they're supposedly recapping (making up for it by considering the same period of the previous year as being a part of the current one). Well, that's just silly, right? I mean, how can an album that came out in November 1999 be considered one of the best albums of 2000? Huh? Can you tell me that?

Well, I know how they feel. Both the O Brother Where Art Thou? soundtrack (Mercury) and the New Pornographers' Mass Romantic (Mint) were released in the last six weeks of 2000, and even though they remained under the radar until the new year, 2000 is 2000. If you don't believe me, take a look at the damn copyright notices on the CDs (those who would nitpick that copyright does not equal release I hold near and dear to my heart but must be drowned out for the nonce, even in light of the CD with a copyright date of 2002 that I spotted a good two weeks before New Year's). Thus, even though they are psychologically 2001 records, they do not meet the cutoff for this year's list, and so I can't tell you that O Brother (which the Boston Globe, in fact, listed in this year's best-of) calls public attention to some of the purest and most beautiful folk and bluegrass songs you'll ever hear in a way that the Anthology of American Folk Music (reissued a scant four years ago) somehow didn't (I blame the price tag of the latter when I'm not feeling cynical and the fact that the former comprises mostly new recordings by recognizably-named artists when I am) or that Mass Romantic (spotted on at least three other best-of lists), an astonishingly varied power pop explosion with two gorgeously assured lead vocals by alt-country siren Neko Case, almost certainly would have taken the top spot this year and for a long time couldn't be pried from my CD player with a crowbar and a summons. I even went so far as to contact their publicist to see if the U.S. release date lagged enough behind the Canadian release to make the cutoff, but no dice.

The omission of the above from this year's list was structurally determined, but why not just tack them on to last year's ? Can't do it, and not just for those two; when it comes to Bangs' Sweet Revenge (Kill Rock Stars), well, I just plain dropped the ball, seeing them live around the time of the album's release and thinking nothing of it until I was afforded an opportunity to interview the band about a year later. I listened to the CD as research and immediately smacked my forehead in embarrassment for not knowing about it beforehand. The album was punky, snotty, rude, overly emotional, funny and melodramatic... in other words, it sounded exactly like a teenager (or at least one who's going to turn out just fine, and careful readers will want to take note of the subtle foreshadowing here). And it fell victim to my other rule, which is that I don't amend previous years' lists just because I may have missed something at the time (otherwise Neutral Milk Hotel's In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (Merge) would have been ex post facto perched confidently atop my headless 1998 list ). But part of coming up with your own rules is that you don't have the luxury of breaking them. Or do you? I forget. In any case, I've just managed to throw those three albums in here without sacrificing my integrity (while, I think, creating a new category, the Would've), so I'll move on quickly to my top ten before you realize that you've been had.

1) Noelle, This Summer (Rum Raisin). She's 15 years old, all of her songs are written by someone else (a guy, for what that's worth) and there is, my friends, a drum machine. What sets Noelle apart from the Mandies, Britneys and Christinas of the world isn't just that she's not gunning for megastardom, although that may well be at the root of it, nor is it her new wavey mid-'80s AOR-punk songs, although that's evident enough. It's the fact that, unlike those just mentioned (and, it must be said, Fiona Apple and Michelle Branch), she is willing (and, from the sound of it, thrilled) to be a goddamned teenager, with all of the giddiness, agony and frustrated longing that real goddamned teenagers go through. The sound of a gifted high schooler's natural response to how a record like the first Weezer CD can change your life, This Summer is one of those albums where every single song could (and, dammit, should) be a massive hit, so the highlights change daily (today's special: "Carwash Romance," where the guitars are so primed and ready after impatiently holding back during the verses that the hook fairly leaps out of the song). Sure, her voice (think Juliana Hatfield with Liz Phair's claustrophobic range) is swell, as are Dave Pino's exquisitely rendered songs about such adolescent touchstones as sudsing cars for cash, saying stupid shit to make your friends laugh and boys sweet boys, and it's great that her idea of an unimpeachable come-on is "I can run as fast as anyone I know." But underlying it all, and elevating This Summer to greatness, is the simple, unacknowledged fact that the popular girls who point and stare do it only because they know all too clearly what Noelle just senses: that she's only beginning to find out who she is and what she's capable of. And they're already fading.

2) Gillian Welch, Time (The Revelator) (Acony). There was a period of time this year, two weeks or so, when there were really only two things that gave me much solace: Beethoven's 6th symphony and Welch's album, released only a few weeks prior and chosen for no more prosaic reason than the fact that it was in my CD rotation at the time. Uncle L. doesn't go on the list because his record came out, like, a while ago. Gillian, in the meantime, takes the spot on my list that Bob Dylan's admittedly worthy Love and Theft holds on just about everybody else's. Sad, plainspoken and just poetic enough, Time's two acoustic guitars (go rent Down From The Mountain to see how hard David Rawlings is working and how easy he makes it look) and close folk harmonies are nostalgic for a time that Welch is patently too young to recall, clear-thinking enough to know that it's glossing over the bad parts and progressive to the point of questioning the motives of those who helped shut down Napster. In the process, Time surveys an American landscape that probably didn't exist when it was recorded and now almost certainly never will again. This record might not mean the same to me in a different world but, well, we have to live in this one now.

3) You Am I, Dress Me Slowly (BMG Australasia). [can be ordered from Whammo.com ] Taking into account The Temperance Union (a solo-career telegraphing bonus disc by leader Tim Rogers on his lonesome, included with early pressings of Dress Me Slowly) and the 8 non-album songs on the accompanying singles, You Am I have put out two albums' (and change) worth of material this year. The best of the lot (and the only one you're likely to find on these less enlightened shores, sometime next year, maybe) is, smartly, Dress Me Slowly itself, which is the weakest of the Australian band's six-album output and still manages to place a good half of its songs on the all-time list (whatever quibbles I might have, when Rogers howls "Think I'm gonna die/From tryin' to kick a hole in the sky," I start flying). Volume down, introspection up, it's The Who By Numbers without "Squeeze Box" or that damn Entwistle tune. Good lads. Now please don't break up.

4) Madonna, GHV2: Greatest Hits Volume 2 (Maverick/Warner Bros.). In the words of Spin, c. mid-'90s, I give.

5) Ivy, Long Distance (Nettwerk America). [The following is, verbatim, the review that I submitted to Entertainment Weekly in July, which they inexplicably neglected to run. Or acknowledge.] On their third album, Ivy concoct an extended ode to impermanence swathed in the sort of swoony stylings that make you wonder why Burt Bacharach never had a Frenchwoman sing his frothy pop cocktails. Dominique Durand's cool, breathy timbre rectifies that lapse in judgement while Andy Chase's unresolved acoustic chords and Adam Schlesinger's insistent bass provide a danceably melancholic Continental groove. And in "While We're In Love," they deliver a gorgeous pop song about the fleeting nature of romance with such assurance that they can stack, oh, a dozen hooks on top of one another by the end, confident that you'll remember every one regardless. A-

6) Sigur Rós, Ágætis byrjun (PIAS America). The only way I can think to even come close to describing this album is to say that it suggests a national symphonic folk music of a nation that is equal parts Iceland (the actual home of Sigur Rós), the Balkans and wherever the unseen beings who left those monoliths for us to discover in 2001: A Space Odyssey came from. Guitars and pianos swell like forces of nature, the orchestral arrangements deepen the music rather than sweeten it, the half-whispered vocals murmur lyrics that may be Icelandic or may just be (as has been reported) gibberish but are no less captivating for their impenetrability. Unimaginably beautiful.

7) Tenacious D, Tenacious D (Epic). As relentlessly foulmouthed (and -minded) as South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut and just as smart about it, Tenacious D blasts your ass off with a barely controlled ferocity combined with an absolute conviction that they are, in fact, the world's greatest band despite the utter ludicrousness of their lyrics, topics and conception. That the comedy, in both sketch and song, bears repeated listening is due to a prudent emphasis on timing and delivery over text, and the music walks a line so delicately balanced between reverence for and mockery of '70s stoner rock that it achieves a feat far more powerful (and prone to failure) than either, which is that of pure exploitation. Kage (the guitar god) and Jables (the shrieking viking) deconstruct just what it was that made minor-key demon encounters and major-key self-mythologizing so damned powerful way back when and reassemble only the choicest tidbits back together for maximum impact, so that songs like "Tribute" and "Wonderboy" don't get any more obvious, or surprising, or archetypal. When "Rock Your Socks" explodes following a hilarious riff on "Bourrée in E Minor," you'll know why or lie bleeding in their wake. Either way, you will have felt the awesome power of the D.

8) Jason Falkner, Necessity: The 4-Track Years (spinART). Lazy? You bet. A stalling gambit? Most likely. Better than most well-appointed releases? And how. My initial reluctance to fully dig Falkner's naked baby pictures sprung from my appreciation of how well he grew up (it takes a fair bit of guts for a guy whose last album was a massively orchestrated, densely produced collection of sweeping pop songs to chuck this into the ring as a followup). Then I realized just how much more on fire this album's "My Home Is Not A House" is than the final studio-produced version (bonus points to anyone who's heard the latter... I'm talking to you, Makovic). The rest of it fell into place from there, from the Badly Drawn Boy-predicting acoustic pop of "His Train" to the all- Rubber-Soul-all-the-time "Song For Her" and "Take Good Care Of Me," wherein George Harrison bolts from the Beatles after Sgt. Pepper to join the Velvet Underground (a surprising influence that also shows up in the "All Tomorrow's Parties"-ness of "Road Kill Blues"). The truly astonishing thing, though, is the utter lack of all the little fuckups that 4-tracking and home demoing usually entails (flubbed guitar line here, bass slightly out of synch there...), indicating that not only were his opera fully conceived by the time he got into a real studio but that he was up to making it happen, which is remarkable, considering that the guy's cheap demos still contain more instruments than most bands that... well, just most bands. I mean, just imagine the records he could create if he streamlined. But then, the album's not called Simplicity for a reason.

9) Weezer, Weezer (Geffen). I probably can't tell you anything that you don't already know, since I'm probably too late to suggest that Weezer are nothing more or less than the world's most popular emo band or that "Hash Pipe" was clearly the most perverse sing-along tune on the radio this year. Sanity (more or less) returned, Rivers & da boyz deliver an album of loud-guitar nerd-pop that differs not one whit from their identically titled debut (take that, Peter Gabriel!) beyond the absence of a "Buddy Holly" or "Say It Ain't So" (though "Photograph" and "Island In The Sun" try their respective best). Having docked the album one notch per for the above (not so harsh when you consider that the absence of those poorer cousins would have docked them one notch per yet again), all that's left for me to say is, we missed you, you Halen-loving dorks. God bless you and welcome back. May you never lose your crazy way again.

10) The Strokes, Is This It (RCA). Like listening to Crazy Rhythms just before the speakers blow, the most hyped band/album/cover art of the year drops one propulsively austere guitar atop another and it sounds ornate and positively organic. Not to mention dead simple; the chorus riff of "Soma" is so plainly there that it's a wonder it hasn't been recorded in the half century of rock 'n' roll leading up to this moment. I'm slightly abashed that I failed to put my money where my mouth is and get the import version, which seems to be fast becoming the most prized of the three (or is it four?) versions of this album out there. Sorry about that; the final domestic release (minus the racy cover art and with "New York City Cops" swapped out) cost half as much, and I suspect that the song, which by all reports isn't exactly inappropriate but certainly wouldn't help any at this particular historical moment, will pop up on these shores eventually. Until then, I'll simply enjoy the sound of a ludicrously tight band apotheosizing the rhythm guitar and muse that Julian Casablancas has all the ingredients to be a great frontman: a bad attitude, a good haircut and a great name. Oh, and he sings okay, too.

A half-dozen stand-alone songs from the past twelve months worth wasting your time to talk about:

Amber Benson, "Under Your Spell." The unflaggingly fantastic Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit another all-time high this year with "Once More, With Feeling," an astonishingly superlative musical episode that is recommended in its original hour-plus length (the single-hour edit is a necessary evil that destroys much of the crucial pacing and setup). If the soundtrack had been released as was being hinted, I might have been compelled to cram it in the top album spot. Instead, I'll continue to indulge in rumor and hearsay and assume that it will legitimately make my 2002 list . In the meantime, I'll single out this gorgeous low-self-esteem love ballad that works just fine as a breakaway pop song. As is the case with what I've come to discover is a dismayingly large number of my favorite singers, Benson's voice is by no means perfect, but she uses it effectively to communicate rather than grandstand (perhaps a result of her being paid to be an actress, not a musician) on this Fairport Convention-esque track, which songwriter and show creator Joss Whedon provides with a surer sense of melody than you'd expect from somebody who used to write for Roseanne. How the thing ends is still up in the air, though, since the show cuts the song, um, mid-climax.

System of a Down, "Chop Suey!" Well, hell, if this is the direction that hard rock must go, then what's to worry about? Smart moves: hardcore riffing that cuts instead of bludgeoning and a frontman who not only chooses to sing but has the pipes to pull it off.

Ryan Adams, "Touch, Feel & Lose." I totally get why people love this album. Adams clearly has talent to burn, and he spends 70 minutes diligently lighting fires to prove it. Gold's first half isn't bloat, really, just a batch of songs of varying quality, which is why it doesn't come close to sinking the blazing second half. For me, this cut is the highlight, a barely controlled Memphis soul number in which "I just wanted you to love me" is met with the only response that reasonably awaits it (when you really look at it, it's pretty much a Hail Mary, last-ditch plea). And just before the third "Cry, cry, cry" postchorus is a truly awesome Hammond roar that will tear your heart out before you even realize it was making a move for your chest.

The Go-Go's, "Insincere." The woman grabs her purse and heads toward the front door. The man who's been wasting her time (for weeks? months? years?) barely budges. She pauses, briefly but perceptibly. He picks up on it and makes a token effort to acknowledge her departure, not because he loves her and is sad to see her go but because he doesn't want to be impolite. She blankly accepts his kiss, and then she reaches for the doorknob. This song, the supreme highlight of God Bless The Go-Go's , takes place in the next fraction of an instant and transforms the simple act of opening that door into catharsis. This was the last time, she swears. She hopes.

Jon Brion, "Ruin My Day." Because "over" doesn't mean "finished." Inspirational verse (Christgau apologies, blah blah): "Love, it was lovely, it hardly hurt a bit/Sounds good to me but unfortunately I remember it."

Josie & the Pussycats, "Three Small Words." Oh, not the single, God, no. That was by-the-numbers punk-pop, with pointless come-on lyrics that continued to rhyme long after they should have stopped and a counting-backwards chorus conceit that became insufferable the second I noticed it. No, I mean the version in the television commercial, which mixed and matched bits and scraps from unrelated verses, taking care of two of the lyrical problems outlined above and, in so doing, cranking up the energy and hurtling straight into the chorus, which, to be fair, was pretty outstanding even shoulder-to-shoulder with filler and, hell, the counting-backwards bit actually was kinda clever. I'm also acutely aware that my preferred version is precisely 30 seconds long, so make of that what you will.

The Better Late Than Never Award was grabbed before February, folks (although my discovery of Creedence Clearwater Revival's unbelievably superlative Cosmo's Factory in October at least gave it some healthy competition coming down to the wire). Seems there's this band called the Buzzcocks whose Singles Going Steady is one of those fine albums that I've always admired and never bought, because somewhere in the back of my mind, I knew that I was waiting to splurge for Product (EMI, 1989), an out-of-print (and only in England, at that) 3-CD gem that compiles everything the band released after the indie Spiral Scratch EP and before the reunion of 1993's Trade Test Transmissions. Wait's over. The most pop-minded of the Class of '77, the Buzzcocks blazed forth with the music that Glen Matlock was kicked out of the Sex Pistols for wanting to make. Like the Undertones after they've grown up and gone to college, Manchester's finest are tuneful in the extreme, aggressive as hell and unantagonistically cheery, which only makes "Orgasm Addict" and "Oh Shit!" that much more nerve-rattling. The soup-to-nuts sweep of collecting everything the band put on wax during their first go-round also contributes the magic of solipsistic context to their oeuvre, allowing you to catch their in-jokes (how many songs can they fit the "Boredom" riff into?) and the sonic experimentation for which most people neglect to give them credit (the call-and-response guitars of "Why Can't I Touch It?" may very well demonstrate the greatest use of stereo ever committed to tape). And above it all, there's that worldview, a resolutely British commitment to sticking to one's principles in the face of withering opposition. People seem to forget that just as every cynic is secretly a beaten-down romantic, a lot of nihilists are really just disgusted humanists. So when Pete Shelley howls, "There is no love in this world anymore" for what seems like an eternity that can't last nearly long enough (it's only 3 minutes, actually) on A Different Kind of Tension's final real song, "I Believe," he's not challenging mom and apple pie (or queen and country, as the case may be), he's upholding it in the face of incontrovertible odds. Which, when you think about it, more than makes up for "What Do I Get?" selling SUVs for Toyota.

No movies this year. You've been patient enough.

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