Look Back in Anger #4

Look Back in Anger #4
by Justin Cober-Lake

What would you do differently if you could do it all over again? The intention of this column is to go back in the ol’ time machine to examine the albums that we personally named the best of a given year and see if we still feel the same way about them. Did they age well? Do we still play them? Did we leave off an album that we’re now kicking ourselves over? These are the questions we will be asking ourselves in this WWIA? Series.

This week, Justin Cober-Lake reexamines his Best of 2003 list.



I began my career as a music critic in 2003. I always feel compelled to simultaneously hide and confess the fact that I hadn't been a music nerd for too long before that. I didn't grow up poring through music mags or rounding up Velvet Underground. I had gotten enough of a handle on things by 2003 that I felt confident enough to start writing, but barely.

When it came time for list-making, I didn't really have much to offer. I had spent most of the year following trends, trying to learn what "good" music was. I'd have been insulted, of course, if you'd have suggested I was following the crowd, but I was to an extent, primarily by reading every article on PopMatters and Pitchfork and then downloading or occasionally buying whatever they told me to (eMusic was a blessing). When I went into my stacks to re-listen to 2003 for this article, I was struck by how much the music I had at the time could line up with the best-of lists of either particular magazines or Metacritic. Or were completely random albums I had reviewed.

Still, I think I did a pretty decent job putting together a collection of records that I liked, and it holds up reasonably well for me today (even if there's a distinct appeal to only one color/sex/style of person and no thought for spiritual music). I'll probably knock about half the list out of the top 10, but I still think they're all good records, and acceptable picks at the time. As is always the case, I didn't necessarily pick what had the most holding power, and that's one of the ways I can tell in retrospect which albums I really should have included.

Where I give myself away, though, is less with my list and more with my comments. Start with the fact that I had to include four "honorable mentions." I had probably heard 20-25 albums by the time I made my list, so it's doubtful that I needed to mention 14 of them in my top 10. Notice that for my last album, by the Unicorns, I mention how they knocked the Shins out of the final spot. It's a moment where I have to assert my familiarity with the landscape (because I'm questioning it internally), but also where I'm assuming that it's just conventional wisdom that the Shins are a top 10 pick. I need to explain not having them.

And so my list goes like that, with me trying to hide a lack of knowledge (of music in general and of 2003) and of confidence (in my taste), and secretly giving away both. One final note: I kept Broken Social Scene off my list because I was being a snob about the release date. I had ordered the Canadian release in 2002 and wanted to prove -- if only to myself -- that I knew when that album really came out.


1. Elbow, Cast of Thousands (V2)

I can stick by this pick. This was the second import CD I had ever bought (BSS being the first), and easily the most impulsive. I had streamed the album at some site online and was so blown away that I downloaded the previous album and immediately ordered this from Amazon UK. Note that it wouldn't come out in the US until 2004, but I was consistent with my dating system. I still love this one five years later, and imagine I always will.

2. Calexico, Feast of Wire (Quarterstick/Touch and Go)

Another one I don't have a problem with, and re-listening to it with this list in mind made me think that the gap between #1 and #2 here is smaller than I'd have thought. Burns and Convertino can't go wrong, but this disc just works better than the others, right from that opening line through the restlessness of "No Doze" (or, more fittingly, through the bonus tracks and "Fallin' Rain".

3. The Wrens, The Meadowlands (Absolutely Kosher)

I must have been caught up in the backstory and the different feel that this had in my louder, more raucous collection. It's a smart, beautiful album, but I've only played it a handful of times since 2003, and I can only hum two songs off it. It's an album I appreciate and respect more than I spin, and, in this case, that has to bump it down a little.

4. Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantics (Dirtnap)

Love it. This should have been the last album I bought before I got married, but… it was just before two days of driving and shortly before my stop in the music store that I read about their tragedy [only one member of the band survived a touring van accident] and, out of nervousness, bought Grandaddy instead. This kind of music sounds like it should be easy to make, but if that were so, there'd be more bands this enjoyable.

5. Clearlake, Cedars (Domino)

The first half of this album is definitely top ten. The second half holds up well, but it's just not as strong. I really dig this band, but the gushing praise I gave this as one of my early reviews and its placement at number 5 isn't quite deserved.

6. Gotan Project, La Revancha del Tango (Ya Basta!/XL/Beggars Group)

This record fit perfectly in with my explorations of electronic music at the time, and especially in downtempo or lounge-y acts. The blend here still works really well for me, and, probably because of my limited palette, I haven't heard much that does what this one does as well as it does, mixing electronics and the tango. Discovering this record was fun, as was discovering that I could really like something like this record.

7. Ted Leo and the Pharmacists, Hearts of Oak (Lookout!)

Clearly I gave Leo my vote for Tyranny of Distance. As much as I like Leo, I don't know how this record snuck on. I don't even remember liking it this much, even though I went through a Ted Leo phase and still dig "Where Have All the Rude Boys Gone?"

8. Grandaddy, Sumday (V2)

An example of me liking something I was supposed to like. "Now It's On" remains a great cut, but I played this album too much at the time, and I haven't picked it up in years. Going back over it, it really is a good record and I don't mean to disparage it, but I think it benefited from me not having heard much like it at this point. The indie world was relatively new for me and I found something here I could connect with.

9. Four Tet, Rounds (Domino)

I don't know why I like Four Tet so much, and I've even been considering doing an article on this year's release with exactly that premise. Everything this guy puts out really connects with me, even though he's not operating in a genre(s) that I usually flip for. This release just has so much going for it in so many ways. It's easy to forget how many ideas are packed in here because Hebden does it so smoothly.

10. The Unicorns, Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? (Alien8 Recordings)

Happy to be weird. I like that it's goofy and fun, and has some incredible pop hooks in the middle of it. I'm unsure what to do with it, because I think it's a blast and I have warm fuzzies from its appearance during the newlywed bliss period of my life. Even counting its brevity as a strength, though, it's still just a little too long. I might regret what I do with this one...

I haven't really broken away from what I recognize as circumscribed thinking from that period. My tastes expanded wildly after this point and I started listening to drastically more albums per year. Even so, I haven't shaken the connections I made with some of the albums from that period (and will confess that my Postal Service love might be influenced by the numbers of listens my new wife and I gave it on long car rides). My new list is only as fleetingly accurate as the first, but it does account for durability even if it marks a somewhat frozen moment of thinking. Interestingly, though, none of my honorable mentions even sniff this one.

New List:

Elbow, Cast of Thousands
Dave Douglas, Freak In
Calexico, Feast of Wire
Broken Social Scene, You Forgot It in People
Four Tet, Rounds
The Postal Service, Give Up
Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantics
Gotan Project, La Revancha del Tango
Jason Moran, The Bandwagon
Derek Webb, She Must and Shall Go Free

Original list

Honorable mentions: The Shins, Chutes Too Narrow; The Heavenly States, The Heavenly States; The Jayhawks, Rainy Day Music; Over the Rhine, Ohio

Justin Cober-Lake is the interviews editor at PopMatters and has published fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and lyrics in a variety of places, including Stylus, Pastemagazine.com, Chord, and Trouser Press. He's been writing steadily for Wrong Note Media for several years, and his work made its first appearance on CD with the release of Todd Goodman's first symphony, Fields of Crimson.

Look Back in Anger #3

Look Back in Anger #3
by Christopher R. Weingarten

What would you do differently if you could do it all over again? The intention of this column is to go back in the ol’ time machine to examine the albums that we personally named the best of a given year and see if we still feel the same way about them. Did they age well? Do we still play them? Did we leave off an album that we’re now kicking ourselves over? These are the questions we will be asking ourselves in this WWIA? Series.

This week, Christopher R. Weingarten reexamines his 2003 Pazz & Jop ballot.



This was my first Pazz & Jop list ever.


1. Kaada - Thank You for Giving Me Your Valuable Time

2. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow

3. Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues

4. Tes - X2

5. The White Stripes - Elephant

6. Blood Brothers - Burn Piano Island, Burn

7. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance

8. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album

9. The Locust - Plague Soundscapes

10. Avenged Sevenfold - Waking the Fallen


I was young, eager, green, and mostly pumped beyond pumped that Voice music editor Chuck Eddy would even respond to one of my emails, let alone converse with me for days about Lil Jon in a manic back and forth. Fueled on No New York, Company Flow, Throbbing Gristle and Tenacious D, my 23-year-old self prided aesthetic style over substance. And while all of the albums on my 2003 Pazz and Jop ballot are all still pretty fantastic in my eyes (save Avenged Sevenfold), they were chosen by someone who was quicker to support a cool artistic decision than something that simply connects with people.

1. Kaada - Thank You for Giving Me Your Valuable Time

Totally slept-on at the time (I think I was the only writer to have it on my ballot) and pretty much slept-on now. Norwegian slicer-’n’-dicer John Erik Kaada made a mutant pop record that sounded kitschy and unique, weird and inviting. He recorded all the “samples” himself, looping trumpet sounds he made with his mouth, vocals recorded through his doorbell’s intercom, mixing doo-wop and Morricone. It was awesome—Prince Paul as Prince—but now I realize it’s maybe more brilliant in idea than execution. Still, I would never want to discourage anyone from checking out this incredible album. Start with “No You Don’t,” which is maybe the best link between old Portishead and new Portishead and maybe RZA somehow.

2. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow

In 2003 it was hard not to think of Lightning Bolt as the band destined to be this generation’s Public Image Ltd. or Wire or Gang of Four, the guys that would launch a new era in art-punk, make a Daydream Nation, maybe even influence pop music. In the end all we really got was Timbaland saying he likes Black Dice, a bunch of unremarkable bands like Pocahaunted, and a Muse cover that people on message boards still like to LOL about. Whatever, Wonderful Rainbow is still a non-stop thrill ride, the exact moment where LB melded their jet-engine bluster with classic rock precision. Still a new classic to these ears.

3. Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues

No regrets. It’s a shame other people didn’t latch on to this when they should have. Buck’s been in identity crisis mode and record label hell ever since. And he was never as gripping and heartfelt when he was telling other people’s stories over banjos and fake Tom Waits clang.

4. Tes - X2

At the time it was perfect post-911 underground hip-hop. Paranoid, post-apocalyptic, cooler than you, rebuilding from pieces of pop and dub and electronic, custom-made for hipster DJs when hipster DJs still spun OOIOO records, a nasal whine that was a sui generis cry from the rubble (and that rubble was being painted by Neck Face). Does it hold up? Can’t say I ever went back to it…

5. The White Stripes - Elephant

Best major label rock band of the decade, sure. But, really, look at their competition.

6. Blood Brothers - Burn Piano Island, Burn

Too many ideas, not enough songs. Still, amazing energy and spirit. Not the best album, but we need these guys more than ever right now.

7. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance

No regrets. Bubba cuts through the gimmick and gets to the heart of his environment. Big Boi/Andre was the story of the year but Timbaland/Organized Noise splitting duties is the secret winner.

8. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album

No regrets. I will never understand why this album isn’t spoken in the same breath as The Blueprint or The College Dropout. It’s absolutely everything a rap album should be: An MC vividly breaking down how he is a product of an environment that most people don’t see, songs full of focused rage juxtaposed with songs of celebratory nihilism, an auteur’s sense of vision (he produced the whole thing too), and—duh—tons of incredible beats. If nothing, it reminds me of Willie D’s 1989 album Controversy, which was also incredible and totally slept-on.

9. The Locust - Plague Soundscapes

Still their best. but I was mostly wowed by how “extreme” it was compared to their previous albums while still keeping true to a complicated aesthetic. This band is a great execution of a vision.

10. Avenged Sevenfold - Waking the Fallen

“Eternal Rest” sounded like Angel Dust-era Faith No More. This band is totally terrible now. They tricked me.


With five years distance, here is my new top 10. New picks are in bold.:

1. David Banner - Mississippi: The Album

2. Jay-Z – The Black Album

3. Buck 65 - Talkin' Honky Blues

4. Bubba Sparxxx - Deliverance

5. Lightning Bolt - Wonderful Rainbow

6. TV On The Radio – Young Liars EP

7. The White Stripes - Elephant

8. 50 Cent - Get Rich or Die Tryin’

9. Jaylib – Champion Sound

10. Killer Mike - Monster

Christopher R. Weingarten was the editor-in-chief of recently deceased music site Paper Thin Walls. His work has appeared in the Village Voice, Revolver, Spin, Rollingstone.com, Decibel, The Source, CMJ New Music Monthly, Relix, eMusic and probably some other places he’s forgetting. He’s slowly but steadily working on a 33 1/3 book about Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

Look Back in Anger #2

Look Back in Anger #2
by John M. Cunningham

What would you do differently if you could do it all over again? The intention of this column is to go back in the ol’ time machine to examine the albums that we personally named the best of a given year and see if we still feel the same way about them. Did they age well? Do we still play them? Did we leave off an album that we’re now kicking ourselves over? These are the questions we will be asking ourselves in this WWIA? Series.

This week, ex-Stylus alum John M. Cunningham reexamines his top 10 albums of 2002.



It was a few days after Christmas, 2002, while on vacation with my family in New York, and I was rambling at my dad about how guilty I felt for not having seen more movies or heard more albums over the course of the year. How could I justifiably put together a meaningful top 10 list when I had so many blind spots? My dad didn't get all the agony. "You make it sound," he interrupted, "like you're some sort of working critic."

He had a point. This was months before I started a blog and a whole two years before I was deemed qualified enough to participate in the Village Voice's Pazz and Jop poll. I was writing for nobody. But mine was a generation weaned on Siskel & Ebert and Entertainment Weekly, and I had friends whose voracious appetites for pop culture resulted in a barrage of e-mails at year's end, trading lists of favorites. As someone who, at age 13, proudly designated winners of the 1st Annual JMC Movie Awards, I was hardly immune to these kinds of diversions. In fact, I took them embarrassingly seriously. Not long before I arrived in New York I'd had a dispute with my friend Matt, for instance, over whether or not critics' top 10s should be purposefully eclectic (he voted yes; I was put off by anything that bore any trace of dishonesty and loudly said so).

So of course I had attempted to assemble a list of my favorite albums of 2002 on the plane ride over, and a month and a half later, once I got over whatever trepidation I felt about my critical myopia, I revised it and posted it on the I Love Music message board, as follows:

1. Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights

2. Do Make Say Think, & Yet & Yet

3. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

4. …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Source Tags & Codes

5. Mum, Finally We Are No One

6. Archer Prewitt, Three

7. Pretty Girls Make Graves, Good Health

8. The Notwist, Neon Golden

9. The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots

10. Enon, High Society

There are a couple of things that make this snapshot interesting to me in retrospect. For one, though I had frequently pored over the best-of issues published by magazines like Spin, I didn't always make it a priority to actually hear the albums mentioned therein, instead choosing to follow my own increasingly rarefied tastes (by the turn of the decade, this meant mostly post-rock and lounge-pop). In 2002, however, I was reading Pitchfork more regularly than before (my brother, whom I lived with, was an intern there), and it suddenly seemed important to expand my listening habits, especially toward the guitar-based indie rock the site lionized.

The other thing is that shortly after I compiled this list, my musical taste would undergo a more significant shift, as the twin influences of ILM (discovered February 2003) and Limewire (downloaded July 2003) made me more sympathetic to hip-hop, chart-pop, and electronic dance music in particular, and hungrier to explore new music in general.

The main conclusion to be drawn here is that 2002 was a transitional year for me musically, which makes this list a perfect candidate for some ex-post-facto reconstruction. In the last couple of weeks, I've re-listened to everything above, along with a slate of more than a dozen other contenders, to determine which of these albums hold up six years later and which might be swapped out. Let's start from the top.

* * *

1.

After Interpol's Turn on the Bright Lights came out, you couldn't mention you liked it without having to fend off accusations that the band was a too-chic Joy Division rip-off. I strenuously argued against this claim, partly out of a firm belief that there was nothing wrong with derivativeness per se (I defended the Strokes a year before, too), but also partly because, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" excluded, I had never actually heard Joy Division. Turns out it didn't matter. Not only is it apparent to me now that Interpol borrowed from a whole host of early '80s Anglo mope-rock bands, but even hearing their fifth or sixth supposed influence has done little to lessen the appeal of this record. The tight, insistent rhythm section provides a superb foil for Paul Banks's preposterous non-sequiturs (which, like Morrissey's, are a trip to sing along to), and there are a handful of transcendent moments: I still get a rush when the drums kick back in near the end of "PDA." Their subsequent albums have suffered from diminishing returns, but this one's a keeper.

2.

Another reason why I consider 2002 a transitional year is that I got a new iMac that summer and with it one of the most life-changing software applications I've known: iTunes. Nowadays the first thing I'll do upon buying a new CD is import it into iTunes, for ease of listening later. Back then, however, I didn't fully appreciate how awesome it would be to have my entire record collection at my instantaneous disposal, and so plenty of albums from around that time never made it onto the digital realm. Do Make Say Think's & Yet & Yet, a spacey, rhythmically jazzy Canadian post-rock record, was one of them. It's a challenge to re-evaluate something you haven't heard in several years (at some point I stopped listening to CDs altogether, and I had to dig this one out of a box in the closet), since you're never sure if your enjoyment is merely a result of enough time having elapsed to make it seem novel. But in fact, the reason I feel okay about hanging onto this album is because my recent listen wasn't surprising or revelatory at all. It was comfortable, like a lot of post-rock is for me. That expansive mix of shuffling drums and loping guitar lines seemed like something I could keep listening to for a while. So it, too, makes the cut.

3.

Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is a good example of an album I probably wouldn't have bothered with but for an inclination that year to keep up with critically lauded rock music. I liked the twangy "Box Full of Letters," from A.M., which got some local radio play when I was in high school, but I thought about the band so rarely over the next few years that I was somewhat caught off-guard when friends from college began to praise Being There and Summerteeth. Here's the boring truth, though: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is the best Wilco album and, despite demurrals from the likes of Robert Christgau, one of the best albums of 2002, as well. It's not because it's "weird," though I do dig Tweedy's postmodern poetry and Kotche's ramshackle pots-and-pans approach to percussion. The album's main virtue is as a stellar collection of well-crafted songs, and the best of the lot (the mournful "Jesus, Etc.") is in fact one of the most conventional. Wilco's next two records are worthwhile but flawed (however much I love Nels Cline's rippling guitar solos); given the choice, I'll stick with this one.

4.

Now here's where things get interesting. When ...And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead's Source Tags & Codes was released, I readily cottoned to the band's noisy art-rock aesthetic, which seemed equal parts Sonic Youth ("How Near How Far") and Fugazi ("Baudelaire"). It's another record I hadn't heard in maybe five years, however, and when I tried it on again, I was struck by two things: one, how the songs still sparkled, and two, how I had unfairly maligned Sonic Youth's Murray Street. There's an attractive swagger on the Trail of Dead record, but in putting it at #4 I know I was also swayed by Pitchfork's 10.0 review (that and the review of Wilco a month later were the last two perfect scores the site would give out for new albums) and the album's undeniable ambition and cohesiveness, qualities I don't generally value as highly in today's mp3-inundated environment. Murray Street, meanwhile, seemed to fall off toward the end (my friend Emily claimed that "Plastic Sun" was the only cut she liked; I thought it was annoyingly inept) and overall didn't feel like the big best-in-10-years comeback many reviews had promised. I still think it's an imperfect record -- it mostly sounds like a rehearsal for the superior follow-ups, which carve diamonds out of that cool jammy haze -- but it's an imperfect record by one of my favorite bands of all time, and there are moments here (the tangled solos on "Rain on Tin," especially) that a band like Trail of Dead wishes it could match.

5.

In 2002 I didn't have anything against electronic music conceptually; I was just skeptical of what was played in clubs. In fact, I was thrilled to discover Múm's Finally We Are No One, since it grafted melancholic melodies onto a strain of otherwise icy, abstract IDM. I still think highly of "Green Grass of Tunnel" and "We Have a Map of the Piano," both delicately anchored by the bewitching Valtýsdottír sisters' ethereal vocals, but much of the album's second half now sounds tedious and formulaic; there's only so much lonely, sighing melodica one can take. These days I prefer Out Hud's S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D., which, dumb title notwithstanding, makes richer use of its "organic" materials (scratchy guitar, doleful cello) as counterpoint to its electronic beats. Plus, it's danceable. The band's second album is arguably stronger, but it lacks a single moment as gripping as the climax to "Dad, There's a Little Phrase Called Too Much Information," when that frantic twisted-metal synth-noise reaches a fever pitch, then simply falls away.

6.

As a fan of the Sea and Cake, I was naturally drawn to dashing guitarist Archer Prewitt's solo work, and Three didn't disappoint. More '70s orchestral pop than the stripped-down, jazz-inflected style of his usual band, the album was crammed with full-blown sunshine-filled hooks, and most tracks took a clever or unexpected zig-zag or two between start and finish. But I hardly ever listen to it today, and I think that's because, as impressive an achievement as it is, it often feels overstuffed and devoid of personality beneath the expertly constructed, complexly arranged songs. There's more life to be found in the Aluminum Group's Happyness, an equally effortless indie-pop production from fellow Chicago scenesters John and Frank Navin. After experimenting with a different producer for each of their three previous records, the Navin brothers decided to take charge themselves on this one (though John McEntire is credited as an engineer), and the result is probably the best record of their careers. These are sleek, minimalist synth-pop songs that seem tailor-made for iPod headphones (indeed, as of this album, the Navins replaced their live band with an iPod backing track), with lush, buoyant harmonies bespeaking love and loss. I honestly have no idea why I snubbed this at the time.

7.

I once wrote a treatise on emo in which I confessed that while never a full-fledged fan of the genre, I've dallied in it enough to find a few gems here and there. One such find that I somehow failed to mention was Pretty Girls Make Graves, whose 2002 debut, Good Health, wowed me from its first explosive note. It's a short album, just shy of a half-hour, but within that span it packs a lot of raw, infectious attitude, as Andrea Zollo's hopped-up snarls navigate a thicket of darting, swerving guitars. Since this sort of rough-hewn rock (emo or not) is still only an occasional pleasure of mine, and I've never even heard anything else they've done, I nearly surprised myself by deciding to keep it on the list, but recent listens sounded pretty rad. (Recommended, by the way, to those still mourning the demise of Be Your Own Pet.)

8.

In my first-ever blog post (April 2003, yo), I praised the early-decade trend of blending analog melodies and glitchy rhythms, a microgenre that Rob Mitchum, in a Pitchfork review, termed "lap-pop." The Múm album above fit my conception of the aesthetic, as did the Books' Thought for Food (which I also auditioned for this piece), but the best example I had was probably the Notwist's Neon Golden, a pristine, spacious chamber-pop album decorated with crushing, skittering beats. (For some reason a measure of wistfulness was also central to this hybrid sound, and the Notwist had it in spades.) I've gone back to this one on and off for the last few years, but hearing a track like "The One with the Freaks," in which Markus Acher's fragile vocals set up a sudden outbreak of warm alt-rock guitar, made retaining this album a no-brainer.

9.

Okay, I have to admit something now. I haven't re-listened to a lick of the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. That's partly because it never made it onto my iPod, but it's mostly because I don't like it anymore and don't want to reconsider. At the time I even defended it to detractors who considered it a step down from The Soft Bulletin; as a fan since Clouds Taste Metallic, I was happy to see them forging new directions, especially the foray into drum'n'bass on "One More Robot/Sympathy 3000-21." But not long after, I saw the band in an auditorium with Beck and began to be irked by Wayne Coyne's dumbshit grin and huckster routine; later, what I realized about "Do You Realize??" was that it was unforgivably mawkish, and when the bland "Approaching Pavonis Mons by Balloon" won a Grammy for best rock instrumental performance, it felt like an affront. In 2008 the band feels like a relic of my nothing-but-indie-rock past, and so I take a perverse pleasure in substituting them here with a bona fide pop star: Justin Timberlake. I've often said that "Cry Me a River" was the song that perked up my ears and taught me how to love Top 40 again (via an accidental encounter on the radio), but the first eight tracks of Justified -- from the dazzling disco workout "Rock Your Body" to the luxurious ballad "Take It From Here" -- are all so solid and engaging that they make up for the album's admittedly weak back half. Like Coyne, Timberlake's a natural showman, but he benefits from better songs.

10.

Lastly, I couldn't find much to quibble with on Enon's High Society, an album full of weird, tuneful nuggets of indie rock, some of which bear traces of singer John Schmersal's old spazz-rock band Brainiac, and others of which feature dance tempos and girlish vocals from Toko Yasuda. (My favorite cut is still the spiky "Natural Disasters.") Compared with the bulk of indie rock in 2002, Enon was plenty quirky, but if album covers are anything to judge by, let it be noted that a fun day-glo collage is one thing, but a cartoon of yourself in the form of a merman, playing the piano with your fins and the drums with your tail, is quite another. I didn't hear Max Tundra's Mastered by Guy at the Exchange until a couple of years after its release, after some glowing recommendations on ILM, but the scope of its sonic palette -- jumping from sped-up Casio jazz to spooky ambient burbles to a harmonium interlude that reminds me of Badly Drawn Boy -- drew me in immediately. Amazingly, Tundra also manages to weave in some strangely catchy melodies amidst all the hyperactivity. Six years later, and there's not much else that sounds like it.

* * *

So that's it. But there's no way I can rank these again without another prolonged bout of agony, so I'm going to be semi-scientific (and semi-bullshit) about it and list them in order of their iTunes play counts since mid-2003 (averaging out the number of tracks and not giving a shit that some of these weren't even in my library until a week ago):

1. Justin Timberlake, Justified*

2. The Aluminum Group, Happyness

3. Out Hud, S.T.R.E.E.T. D.A.D.

4. Interpol, Turn on the Bright Lights

5. The Notwist, Neon Golden

6. Pretty Girls Make Graves, Good Health

7. Max Tundra, Mastered by Guy at the Exchange

8. Do Make Say Think, & Yet & Yet

9. Sonic Youth, Murray Street

10. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

*Yes, I've played "Rock Your Body" 44 times.

And for a sampling of each album, check out http://bestof2002.muxtape.com.

John M. Cunningham was a staff writer for Stylus Magazine and has recently written profiles of Timbaland and Miley Cyrus for Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Look Back in Anger #1

Look Back in Anger #1
by Todd Hutlock

What would you do differently if you could do it all over again? The intention of this column is to go back in the ol’ time machine to examine the albums that we personally named the best of a given year and see if we still feel the same way about them. Did they age well? Do we still play them? Did we leave off an album that we’re now kicking ourselves over? These are the questions we will be asking ourselves in this new WWIA? Series.

First up is Todd Hutlock’s look back at his 2002 Pazz and Jop ballot.



On first glance, the most glaring thing about my Pazz and Jop ballot in 2002 is that I only named nine albums. I honestly can’t remember naming less than 10 on any other ballot, so this quickly reminded me of something about 2002: I don’t think I was really feeling it. Personally, I was coming to the end of my tenure as an editor at the soul-sucking Alternative Press magazine, and from looking at my choices, the time there had clearly started to take its toll. Listening to a lot of music is one thing; being required to listen and form opinions on literally endless amounts of music not of your own choosing day in and day out is a whole ‘nother thing. Playing music for pleasure was becoming a chore in and of itself. Think about it: If you had to, say, cut hair all day, would you want to come home and relax in front of the TV and cut six or seven more heads for fun?
Anyway, that was my first thought glancing at the ballot. My second thought was, “How in the hell is it that Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not there?” That’s an easy one: I didn’t even hear it until two years later. But if I could do it all over again, it would be number one with a bullet. Or Spoon’s Kill the Moonlight? I have no easy answer for that… But hey, we can’t all hear everything that comes out in a certain year that same year, right? I just don’t have any explanation as to how I ignored two records that I now love to pieces and most definitely was sent promo copies of at the time. Shit, I didn’t even break the shrinkwrap on Summerteeth until 2005…

Anyway, without further ado, here’s my original 2002 ballot in full:

#1. Clinic – Walking With Thee

If memory serves, I had also highly rated Clinic’s previous album, Internal Wrangler, placing it in the upper reaches of the previous year’s Pazz and Jop (possibly even at numero uno, but I’d have to look it up to be certain). I found Walking With Thee to be a more mature, more diverse follow-up, and so naturally, I rated it rather highly, as well.
Little did I know at the time that it would serve to be their high-water mark and that they would spend the rest of their careers making endless Xerox variants of the first two albums. This takes the shine off of Walking a bit for me, but not much. I would still place this firmly in the top five for 2002, but likely not at the summit.

#2. Super Furry Animals – Rings Around The World

Wow, what the fuck happened to these guys? Again, this was a great pop record, full of modern psych sounds and tunes out the ass. I can’t say that I’ve played it much in subsequent years, but that owes more to the fact that the band haven’t exactly held my attention than to the quality of this album. The title track is a fantastic Beach Boys-style romp, “Juxtaposed With U” is the Beta Band’s great lost hit, and the rest is equally charming if a bit overlong. Again, this still firmly sits in the top five, although likely shifted down a spot thanks to Wilco moving into the penthouse. But yeah, I need to dig this one out soon.

#3. Playgroup – Playgroup

Now this is a record that I think I would actually move up if I could, and if anything rivals Wilco for that top spot, it’s Trevor Jackson’s star-studded homage to the favorites of his youth. I adore this album, and I’m not quite sure how I wound up putting it down at three rather than one in the first place (other than maybe I was on the fence and drew lots or something).

If you aren’t familiar, former Output Recordings boss and perpetual hipster Trevor Jackson assembled a supergroup of sorts (including Edwyn Collins, Roddy Frame, KC Flightt (!), Kathleen Hanna, Kyra, Shinehead (!!!), and Peaches, among others) to make an album of 1981-83 vintage alternative disco punk funk hybrid stuff. Being a huge fan of the sounds he was channeling here, I bit this one hook, line, and sinker, and because it was already retro-minded upon release, it has aged quite well. Of the albums on the list, I can honestly say this one has gotten the most plays in the years since and likely will remain that way. So yeah, number two, but with a bullet. On a given day, I might even give this the pole position.

#4. Sigur Ros – ( )

So now we start to get into the region of the list where I have a bunch of good-not-great albums. It tells me something that this is the Sigur Ros album I go back to the least, and yet it ranked the highest on year-ends for me of all of them. I think this would still finish top 20 for me, but certainly not this high. Nice packaging, though, which honestly may have influenced my ranking at the time. I’m a sucker for a nice package.

#5. Beth Orton – Daybreaker

Another album that just sort of blurs into the artist’s back catalog for me (more to come on the list) that I think I selected because I was at a loss at what to rank and I was looking for something solid, reliable, and uncontroversial. Orton eclipsed this one a few years later with Comfort of Strangers, but I still stand by Daybreaker as one of her stronger efforts. I admit that I had to look up the tracklist on Amazon to see what songs were on this, however, and that’s never a good sign. Any other year, this slides top 20 easy but likely not top 10. For 2002 (which was clearly a down year for me, if you haven’t guessed by now), though, I’d put it in the seven-nine range. I fully admit that my love of this album was also influenced by the presence of my hero Johnny Marr on a few tracks and the Four Tet remix of “Carmella” which I still find to be wonderful.

#6. Elvis Costello – When I Was Cruel

See that part above when I mentioned choosing some things because they were from safe, reliable artists that I loved in the past? Yeah, that’s this one all over. I suppose the fact that it didn’t’ suck as hard as some of his other post-Attractions work made me like it more, but in retrospect, this isn’t even a top 10 Costello album, let along the top 10 of 2002. Maybe would scrape the top 20 now. But that’s a big maybe.

#7. Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

A bit of a strange fish here. This album is brilliant and slightly creepy, and I think the uncomfortable sound of it may have made me rank it a bit lower than I should have. It wasn’t the “pleasant” listen of previous BOC records, though I think it stacks up very well in terms of quality. The fact that it didn’t give me good vibes when I played it likely had more to do with my own headspace at the time than anything else. So I would slot this up a few places, even though I do have to be in a certain mood to play it these days. But just because I’m not always in the mood for demented electronic fairy tales doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of my praise.

#8. Jon Spencer Blues Explosion – Plastic Fang

Wow. Yeah, this would not sniff my top 10 again. I still love the opening depth charge of “Sweet and Sour” and “She Said,” but I can’t even remember any of the rest of the tunes here. I still think JSBX are a fuckload better in their prime than the White Stripes and their ilk will ever be, but this is not one of their stronger efforts. I am pretty sure I don’t actually own this album, save for my original Matador promo in the card sleeve, but again, I love the packaging of it, especially the LP version. So bonus points there. Sadly, I don’t think Spencer has done anything even this good since. I miss him.

#9. Liars – They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top

Another “reaction” choice here, as Liars’ sound here was a giant breath of fresh air compared to the nu metal/kiddie punk/gothy goth bullshit I was forced to endure at work every day. It turned out Liars had much better work in them to come, but I still like the crazed energy and fractured attitude of the debut. Number nine seems about right to me. So I got one right!

ADJUSTED 2002 PAZZ AND JOP BALLOT

1. Wilco – Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

2. Playgroup – Playgroup

3. Spoon - Kill The Moonlight

4. Clinic – Walking With Thee

5. Boards of Canada – Geogaddi

6. Super Furry Animals – Rings Around The World

7. The Notwist – Neon Golden

8. Missy Misdemeanor Elliott – Under Construction

9. Liars - They Threw Us All in a Trench and Stuck a Monument on Top

10. The Delgados - Hate.

Todd Hutlock is an editor at some bullshit website.