The year 2000 looms large in pop culture history: the Y2k non-scare… And just like, say, the grunge-defined 1991, the year immediately conjures specific sounds: gleaming teen-pop, earnest radio rock, the Neptunes and Timbaland.

There’s never a bad time to revisit this music. But in the middle of a pandemic it feels extra comforting — a blast of nostalgia for a time when you could safely exit your home, visit your local mall and buy Mystikal’s “Shake Ya Ass” CD single spin

Life Without Buildings – The Leanover For some, the scrape of fingernails on a blackboard is an exquisite sensation. Dentists’ drills provide a satisfying tingle. Animals dying in agony make a heavenly choir. And Sue Tompkins, ‘idiosyncratic’ frontwoman of Life Without Buildings, makes a beautiful noise. Whether or not someone has a good voice is one of those subjective arguments that isn’t usually worth even starting. But really, only mad people and immediate family could warm to Tompkins.

That’s John Mulvey of NME, reviewing my favorite album of the last decade, Life Without Buildings’ Any Other City. For the record, I don’t enjoy the sound of dentists’ drills or animals dying in agony, and I’m not related to Sue Tompkins. But maybe I am a bit mad to feel so strongly about an album that has been heard by so few people. Mulvey’s criticism of Tompkins was a common one when the album was first released: “The band sounds good, but what’s with the singing?” The thing is, Mulvey isn’t exactly wrong. I totally get why the singing style of Tompkins could be torture on the ears of some listeners, who hear what she’s doing and attribute it to pretentious artsiness or put-on quirkiness. However, for a few listeners like me, what Tompkins does on Any Other City is nothing short of pure magic.

Tompkins instantly stands out to anyone who listens to the band due to her high-pitched voice and talk-singing style, which forsakes traditional music lyricism for repetition, seemingly nonsense phrases, stutters and squeals. Love her or hate her, what’s undeniable is that Tompkins has a completely unique presence with boundless energy, enthusiasm, and charisma, and along with her lyrics it makes her a strangely endearing figure. There’s never been a singer quite like Tompkins, or an album quite like Any Other City. tnmbp

The Delgados – Accused of Stealing I love picking albums to pieces, breaking them down and evaluating the parts and the sum thereafter. I can’t, and won’t, do that with The Great Eastern. I want it to just wash over me, like it did in my room in halls nine years ago. I go back to it for that feeling again and again – the day I realised that music could envelop and amplify your own thoughts and feelings, rather than just give you an adolescent stiffy. Not that it never gave me a stiffy, but this album opened the door to a different kind of expression, a more romantic, delicate and Scottish sound. theskinny

Primal Scream – Shoot Speed/Kill Light a motorik, psychedelic near-instrumental that is part New Order, part Velvet Underground, part Neu!. It’s guided by a classic, fuzzed-out Mani bassline, by turns beautiful and ferociously efficient, which is then matched by drummer Darrin Mooney’s relentless, all-energy-no-feeling playing. Gillespie, his voice processed into a robotic gurn, chants the four words of the title, each of them apt to the Scream’s then mantra of violent insurrection, nihilism, transcendence and destruction. Throw in all sorts of strafing, burbling, gurgling free jazz noise, filtered through Martin Duffy’s synthesisers and Kevin Shields’ effects boxes, and a clanging, angular guitar solo from New Order’s Bernard Sumner towards the end, and you’ve got one of the fiercest things in the Primal Scream canon: a track that at once shakes the ground beneath your feet and reaches for the sky. theguardian

Royal Trux – Dirty Headlines one of the best, if not the greatest underground band ever. Everybody seems to know it, but few actually listen to their recorded output to let the music prove it. The Radio Video EP was their penultimate release, and it’s among their finest latter-day offerings…. “Dirty Headlines” features a guest vocal from Reeta Young, but it’s the music that’s most striking. The drum sample thuds and jars like a rubbery Jaki Liebezeit original, and the Can-ness of the track is only exacerbated by Hagerty’s spiralling, echoing guitar textures. There’s some highlight-reel background screeching from Herrema, and Hagerty’s crass lines amount to some of the funniest in the Trux cannon: “You’re so rank you probably try to lick your own skank” and “You could hire a donkey to lick yo’ ass.”

V-Twin – Thankyou Baby A band from Glasgow who really rather like The Velvet Underground and have written a song to prove it. How unusual. The Velvet Underground were an excellent, innovative group who split up in 1971. You can still buy their seminal ‘The Velvet Underground’ album in shops. It’s ace.

WHY THE FUCK DO YOU BOTHER!?

No doubt V-Twin assume their lo-fi, out-of-tune, cutie-pie cred – big shout out to Stuart Murdoch, Stephen Pastel and the Hillhead Massive – inject them with an instant moral superiority over boring grave-digging dadrock tosh like Ocean Colour Scene. It doesn’t. This is worse. nme

Clinic – Distortions Never has Clinic’s VU influence been clearer than on this “Pale Blue Eyes” for an information century. The boys behind the masks pour a can of soul all over a clicky, programmed drum beat, Ade Blackburn’s distinctive bleat sighing images yearning and disturbing through clenched teeth. “I want to know my body/ I want this out not in me” he pleads as a single note on a keyboard rises in support. “I’ve pictured you in coffins/ My baby in a coffin/ But I love it when you blink your eyes” says he in the most sweetly deranged way; it’s gently melodic but there is a hint of malice in there somewhere. ptichfork

St Germain – Rose Rouge This is the song that made me realize I liked jazz. I never disliked it, I just never paid any attention. Jazz was just an aisle in the record store between the music I liked and the cashier where I paid for it… Then someone put on St. Germain’s Tourist, and everything changed. This was jazz? Yes. But it had samples and danceable beats. This was dance music? Yes. But it had live instruments, and flute solos that made your arm hairs prickle. beautifulsongoftheweek

Mull Historical Society – Barcode Bypass the hairs-on-back-off-neck-get-up-and-help me tell-everyone-else-about-this-song masterpiece drownedinsound

Smog -Dress Sexy At My Funeral among his most beloved songs, a jaunty, guitar-driven plea to a dowdy spouse. “Dress sexy at my funeral my good wife/ For the first time in your life,” Callahan sings, before listing the locations where the good wife and the narrator fucked: the railroad tracks, the back room of a crowded bar, “the very graveyard” where he’s been put to rest. There are so many words we use in American culture to say that someone has died. They’ve “passed away” or “left this earth” or “gone to God,” as if simply saying the word is somehow profane. Death, the final act, is so wrapped up in pageantry so as to be indistinguishable from performance; to laugh at it is considered as an affront to dignity. Because of this, “Dress Sexy At My Funeral” feels subversive. That someone would want to be remembered for being really good at sex, as opposed to being an accomplished workhorse who always counted his blessings and gave money to charity, is perfectly reasonable in this space Callahan creates, where buried desire, no matter how absurd, can be shamelessly expressed. “Most of all don’t forget about that time on the beach,” he sings. “With fireworks above us.” stereogum

New Pornographers – Letter From an Occupant Perhaps the only song in my lifetime that could have appeared in Help!, “Letter From an Occupant” is an endlessly turning kaleidoscope, the same handful of chords falling together in progressively prettier combinations. The Lennon-MacCartney moment arrives when a seemingly unstoppable chorus is immediately, effortlessly one-upped by an even catchier whoo-ee-oo section. Neko Case’s voice radiates such sheer delectation with each phoneme that it took me a week of shouting along to realize I wasn’t singing any real words. Whatever the lyrics may have been, a tumble cycle in Neko’s larynx turns them to sparkling doggerel: one dutiful online transcriber hears “Where the hell’d I send these you bought me” where another divines “Where the hell have the 70s brought me?” One line everyone seems to agree on: “This tune you’ll be humming forever.” pitchfork 

Neko Case – Twist The Knife finds Case’s narrator bleeding herself, pleading with a lover to stay, saying that she would “pay with the rest of my life” and “tear out my heart” as the other person walks away. consequenceofsound

Sleater-Kinney – You’re No Rock N Roll Fun the Pacific Northwest trio’s most accessible record – poppy, surfy and possessed of utterly alluring girl-gang cool – and one where they use the idea of accessibility to subversive and provocative ends theguardian

Half Man Half Biscuit – Irk the Purists had the cojones to marry the melody from Black Lace’s Agadoo (at a time when hatred for chart pop was a serious business) to a lyric about annoying those purist music fans whose snobbery sucks all the joy out of music. All together now: “Hüsker Dü-Dü-Dü / Captain Beefheart, ELO …” theguardian

Milky Whimpshake – Dialling Tone exuberantly pestering the object of their affections on the telephone when they get home drunk. This is of course not cool or sexy but, with fantastically childish lyrics like ”Your boyfriend is a jerk/Your relationship doesn’t work” you’ve got to love them in spite their lack of basic social skills. nme

Schneider TM – The Light 3000 something of a landmark in the small, cloistered world of IDM. This clever cover essentially expanded the emotional range of the genre, showing that quirky, abstract electronic production could be integrated seamlessly into a pop context. By dressing up a familiar tune in vibrant electronic tones, Schneider TM showed that glitchy electronic pop could evoke nostalgia, express sadness and longing, and give the head-nodding set something to sing along to pitchfork

Radiohead – Idioteque this pumping club tune – a formal anomaly – feels like Radiohead’s chaotically distilled superego. Ecological dread, big-tech menace and catastrophic panic prevail, but that shiver-inducing synth sample doles out propaganda for hope theguardian

Boards of Canada – In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country Standing in stark contrast to BoC’s usual output, there’s an even-tempered, weightless vibe at work; at first, everything sounds a little too composed, Xanexed into sweet oblivion, but with repeated listens, this EP reveals itself to be every bit as insidious as the duo’s full-length material. pitchfork

Laura Cantrell – Not the Tremblin’ Kind Cantrell reclaims the essence of country songwriting, but she also puts subtle twists on familiar slice-of-life songs about whiskey drinkin’, relationships gone sour, livin’ on the road, and simple girl-wants-boy longing. Her music, whether inherently sad or jubilant, is always delivered with convincing sincerity. She’s also not afraid to explore uncomfortable psychological truths in intimate and eloquent detail. Such affecting down-home realism, of course, is always glossed over by the homogenous evil of the “new” Nashville country. But contrary to country tradition, Cantrell sings no songs about blowing away her spouse with a shotgun ’cause she loved him. It’s just not her style.

The title track could be the anti-“Stand by Your Man,” considering defiant sentiments like: “You want me to get down on my knees, and beg for just a little sympathy/ You want me to go to bed defeated and resigned/ Oh, no, I’m not the tremblin’ kind.”… Instead of applying the old-school production ethic of distancing the singer’s voice with lonesome reverb, producer Jay Sherman-Godfrey lays off the effects board and goes for stark intimacy. This approach accentuates and isolates Cantrell’s voice, so that at times, you get a sense of her delivery being tentative, as if she’s unsure of her range. Ultimately, though, this heightened vulnerability seems to work in Cantrell’s favor: even her slight vocal inadequacies become endearing after awhile.pitchfork

Lambchop – The Old Gold Shoe The NME called Nixon “near to perfect” and the Guardian said that the band was “reinventing American music.”

Meanwhile, most people in America continued to have no idea who Lambchop were… Lambchop’s take on America—sly, tender, mysterious but mundane—is less a realist’s portrait than a surrealist’s impression: funnier, more pathetic, more improbable than what actually exists.

Nixon is still an improbable album. The band never sounds like they’re trying very hard and yet every song breaks some convention or another. Despite its showbiz arrangements, the music is tenuous and weird (a contrast that the band toyed with again on 2012’s Mr. M), and Wagner’s falsetto—usually the most vulnerable part of a man’s singing range—sounds less like a Romeo than some karaoke loser scrapping for the mic at last call. He says he regrets ever calling Lambchop a country band, and with good reason: Nixon isn’t the music of the people, it’s the music of the people who showed up, said hello, stood in the corner and left without saying goodbye. (When an interviewer asked Wagner how he felt about the album’s overwhelming reception in the UK, he said, “I’m not sure that’s something to be proud of. I think there are other things in your life you could be more proud of. Like having kids.”) If there’s a connection to country, it’s spiritual: Nixon finds its humor in self-deprecation and its soul in things broken and left behind… And yet the secret weapon of Nixon—and of all Lambchop’s albums—is tenderness. “The Book I Haven’t Read”, “The Distance from Her to There”, “Up With People”: these are songs that end up insisting that the world is actually a pretty decent place, not just in spite of the banality and clutter, but because of it. After all the broken toys, the disgusting habits, the broken bottles and falling rain, “The Book I Haven’t Read” ends with the line, “We could be—we should be—in love” pitchfork

Badly Drawn Boy – The Shining The Hour Of Bewilderbeast is an unrepeatable success story. We know this partially because Gough has never come close to repeating it. No subsequent Badly Drawn Boy release has recaptured its oddball mystique and homespun charm. Each one has fallen short of its impact and acclaim, too — though to be fair, he set a pretty high bar for himself by winning the Mercury Music Prize on his first try. That’s another aspect of the album that feels impossible to recreate: Would such an unpolished, willfully discursive collection with such humble stakes even have a shot at being honored as Britain’s album of the year anymore? Compared to its predecessors in Mercury Prize glory — a sleek and zeitgeisty cross-section of ’90s event albums from the likes of Primal Scream, Suede, Portishead, Pulp, and Roni Size — it’s remarkable that Gough even snagged a nomination, let alone took home the trophy.

But Bewilderbeast is a strangely magnetic artifact. Like its cover art, the album is a collage. Gough cobbled together sonic materials of various styles and fidelities, cutting and pasting them into a pocket symphony full of holes and lint. The end result landed somewhere between a junkyard-folk Beck mixtape, an Elliott Smith chamber-pop suite, and a Stephen Malkmus daydream about jamming soft rock in the English countryside. A rustic Nick Drake vibe prevailed, but the tracklist often veered off into sound experiments, whimsical interludes, and amateurish genre exercises that worked more often than they failed. stereogum

Teenage Fanclub – The Town and the City Relentlessly upbeat and earnest, dream/sunshine pop popmatters

Echoboy – Kit and Holly Echoboy Richard Warren almost ended up in Oasis. He could have been strumming the chords to “Wonderwall” or close harmonizing with the monobrow Gallagher brothers… “Kit and Holly” comes on like Spaceman 3 on nitrous oxide. Boppy drones and contently eerie synth strings accompany a giddy Warren vocalizing his joys. And though I can detect traces of Playing with Fire throughout the track, I concentrate on Warren’s unfettered, bewildering delight. Kit and Holly must be beautiful people and even better as a pair. You can’t honestly say that about many of our species.

Broadcast – Come On Let’s Go Broadcast were many things – terribly underappreciated by all but those who knew, warily innovative, consistently good, often great – but more than anything, Broadcast were a cool band. This isn’t a flippant appraisal. Birthed in Birmingham, later based in Berkshire, Broadcast made sharp, dissonant sounds, perhaps akin to a contemporary take on the sensual noir of The Velvet Underground or electronic peers Stereolab with weightier stories to tell

At the crux of it all was singer Trish Keenan, who died of pneumonia this morning. She was young, she was talented, and while the band rarely lifted their masks to reveal who they really were (few Broadcast interviews revealed anything beyond the serial numbers of the equipment they were using), Trish seemed like a nice person, certainly no one you’d wish any ill upon.

Her passing is a tragedy, there’s no other way of looking at it. Listen to her band’s 2000 single ‘Come On Let’s Go’ and you’ll be assured what a unique talent she was; Trish sings the song like St. Etienne’s Sarah Cracknell turned inside out, never hitting the obvious note when a more interesting one will do. nme 14th January 2011

The Aislers Set – Red Door The surf-guitar and punk bashing of “The Red Door” revive memories of Linton’s roots, as well as a reminder of the band’s ability to kick in amplification and feedback over what can be quite an atmospherically diverse CD popmatters

The Gentles Waves – Falling From Grace The music often sounds like a delicate web being torn apart, but even in its most hushed moments it teems with intensity allmusic

Kevin Tihista’s Red Terror – Lose The Dress a dreamy song full of dark, lacerating wit uncut

PJ Harvey – This is Love Harvey has always had the devilish skill for evolution and reinvention. She’s been blessed with the trickster’s gift for transformation, able to shed old skins and turn herself into something strange and new. Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea (2000) might just be her most startling mutation, though: here’s slick-and-stylish Polly, sophisticated-and-subtle Polly. But, crucially, there’s nothing tame about Stories. Heaven forbid: as Harvey said herself, it’s only “pop according to PJ Harvey, which is probably as un-pop as you can get to most people’s standards”. Pop according to PJ Harvey, then, is the sleaze-soaked romp of This Is Love theguardian

…And You Will Know Us By The Trail of Dead – Mistakes and Regrets  Madonna is ultimately fueled by universal, eternal anxieties and grievances: the searing salvo “Mistakes and Regrets” renders romantic longing as an apocalyptic event pitchfork

Chicks on Speed – Glamour Girl a fantastically groovy house number inspired in some respect by C+C Music Factory, seems to be making some sort of comment about the empty gestures involved with a woman getting dolled up for a night on the town. “She’s a glamour girl, she stands so still/ Wears a feather bra, her hair is so high/ It starts to sway when she brushes her teeth/ Five times a day.” Since when is good oral hygiene supposed to be a statement about power relationships? The glamour girl may need a haircut, but she’ll likely have the last laugh and the toothiest smile. Sitting here in my filthy undershirt with a head full of cavities, it’s hard to empathize pitchfork

Belle and Sebastian – Women’s Realm fluffy-cardigan handclaps and Schroeder piano… despite all its self-defeating limitations and annoying, fey affectations, this remains a superb record. Quintessentially Belle & Sebastian. Frustrating. Contrary. Insubstantial. Yet, in that insular, cloyingly sanctimonious world they inhabit, still peerless, still irresistible nme

Hefner – Good Fruit In an ideal musical world where the cream does actually rise to the top and Oasis only had two albums, I would not have to explain who Hefner were. You’d already know, because the indie-rock quartet would be on every Q list ever and on MTV2 at every opportunity; there would be no escape. But life isn’t fair kids, life’s a bitch and it hates you. Life will break your heart. That was the point of Hefner, a band renowned for the songwriting of Darren Hayman, for whom lyrical heartbreak lied around every corner. Whilst the ‘cool’ bands wrote songs about the lack of intelligence in the NYPD, Hayman wrote about the Trojan War and the future death of Margaret Thatcher as well as the countless lost loves. The songs of Hefner, whether it was their ultra-lo-fi first recordings or the polished electronica which proved to be their curtain call, were so tactile that they almost reached out and touched you and so honest, so laced with frustration that on occasion it made Belle & Sebastian look bland. “Everytime you cry, it gives me little heart attacks”, sobs Hayman on ‘Good Fruit‘ with an observation so tiny that most writers would never consider it for a lyric. Coupled with a no-nonsense attitude towards intimacy (“you should be lying on your back with a glow in your heart” comes the sleazy observation in ‘Pull Yourself Together‘), this is what earmarked Hefner, for me at least, as something special. nme

The Clientele – (I Want You) More Than Ever Suburban Light, the first full-length by the Clientele, gathered early singles and some other stray tracks. It was a modest record that developed a small cult, one that would grow a little bit with each new Clientele record through the last decade. While the group always had a very specific and identifiable aesthetic, they never quite sounded like this again, if only because, once they were signed to labels and putting out albums, they began to record in proper studios. But while Suburban Light is a special record, it’s not surprising that, for many, it flew under the radar. For one, its core musical idea—guitar-centric indie pop enamored with the gently psychedelic 1960s (deep Beatles cuts, Donovan, Kinks, West Coast Pop Art Experimental Band) and the UK indie pop of the ’80s (Felt, Television Personalities)—isn’t exactly novel. It’s not hard to imagine hearing these songs casually and thinking “Sounds nice enough” and then moving on to something more immediately distinctive. But those who stop there are really missing out; Suburban Light is a very unusual record in its way, a perfectly realized amalgam of time, place, sound, and subject matter.

Indeed, Suburban Light evokes a lonely world. One of the reasons the record sounds so dreamlike is that the narrator is completely in his own head; he wanders lamp-lit streets and sees a carnival crowd dispersing but feels a million miles away. The scenes describing human contact seem to happen more in imagination than reality. So in addition to romanticizing the mundane, Suburban Light also makes moving through the world in solitude and observing it carefully seem like a state of grace.

Driving home all these quiet scenes and minute observations is music that is unfailingly gorgeous. MacLean is an inventive guitar player and he sings with real emotion, and he also has the songwriting chops to hang with his earlier pop heroes. Part of why Suburban Light feels so bound to memory is because the constructions of the songs hearkens back to an age when the right chord change, when paired with the precise melodic turn, counted for everything. The songs seem old in part because their melodic conception is from another era, one when competition for penning tunes was thick… One of Suburban Light’s paradoxical qualities is that it’s not afraid of boredom. Because of its golden AM sonics, Suburban Light always exists on one level as ambiance, the kind of mildly bland prettiness you hear leaking from a beat-up transistor set to an oldies station. That quality, of past and present and foreground and background all existing at the same time, makes me think of a certain strand of atmospheric electronic music.

It’s the definitive statement of early Clientele, and it underscores the kind of subtle brilliance this band was capable of. Suburban Light is ultimately about a particular way of seeing, of looking at your life from the outside while living inside of it, romanticizing events as they happen. All of which connects it firmly to the mindset of youth and young adulthood, when you’re straddling the space between hazy childhood and the uncertain future, inhabiting a world so lovely and unreal. pitchfork

Phoenix – Too Young Perhaps most famous for soundtracking the late-night Tokyo escapades of a camo-clad Bill Murray and adorably fresh and vulnerable Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation, “Too Young” put Phoenix on the map (we just didn’t know how big their blip would get). This synthy pop song embodies the fragile combination of seclusion and connection delicately explored in Coppola’s aforementioned film as the chorus and verses ebb and flow between ecstasy and gloom. consequenceofsound

Elliott Smith – Happiness (Acoustic) Even the sunniest songs in Elliott’s catalogue have a way of hinting at past trauma. Take “Happiness” and its closing refrain: “What I used to be will pass away and then you’ll see/ That all I want now is happiness for you and me.” It’s a lovely sentiment, one that often pops into my mind at the start of a new relationship. But what exactly did Elliott used to be? An alcoholic, an addict, a depressive, a victim of abuse? The song doesn’t say. But these words color the whole track; they turn a nurturing pop song into a eulogy for a past self. consequenceofsound

Dear Nora – In My Room much like the Beach Boys song of the same name, “In My Room” pays tribute to solitude. As Davidson describes how the moonlight pouring in through a window pulls them into dreamland, “In My Room” feels comforting like a well-loved stuffed animal. pitchfork

Sodastream – Fitzroy Strongman It was over twenty years ago that three young Australian’s sat down in Perth and decided to form the band that would go on to become the critically lauded Sodastream. Indeed, it was nearly twenty years ago that their original drummer left and they decided to carry on as a two piece, consisting of Pete Cohen on upright-bass and Karl Smith on acoustic guitar. Between 1997 and 2006, the pair released four albums, four EPs, and toured the world playing with the likes of Yo La Tengo, Smog and Low, as well as appearing at the first ever All Tomorrows Parties at the request of Belle & Sebastian’s Stuart Murdoch fortherabbits

Airport Girl – The Foolishness We Create Through Love Is The Closest We Come To Greatness indiepop doesn’t come up with many epics… And rightly so! Brevity is important in music, so explaining the brilliance of The Foolishness that We Create Through Love Is The Closest We Come To Greatness is tricky, as it clocks in at just over six minutes. I suppose part of it is the spontaneity in the lyrics that seems to force you onto the dance floor. “Just when I thought the chance was missed… well that’s when we kissed” being the moment that the song is hinged around. It just demands you dance to it. sweepingthenation

Grandaddy – The Crystal Lake Jason Lytle once considered a career as a mailman, just so he could guarantee he’d spend most of his day “outside walking around.” Even as touring and fame took him further from the verdant California Sierras, he continued to aspire to return to nature. “The Crystal Lake,” with its fluttering synths and winsome guitar riff, epitomizes that sense of yearning. Lytle has described the song as an “age-old story, repeated many times in country music,” and there is an element of “Dixie On My Mind” in his disses, thumbing his nose at “folks who flake” and fake trees. But unlike Hank Williams or his lonesome contemporaries, there’s no sense that home misses him back. In classic Sophtware form, it laughs at his plight: “It knows you’re just a modern man.” There may be no returning to the shimmering, titular lake, but in the meantime, they make do with a killer guitar solo. stereogum

Peaches – Lovertits In 2000, recovering from cancer and heartbreak, Merrill Nisker bought a synth, renamed herself Peaches and made a scorching album that became a feminist classic theguardian

Gonzales – Futuristic Ain’t Shit To Me The Entertainist sees Chilly reworking and reinventing rap and Hip Hop for the 21st, while the album prior was a selection of luscious pop ballads. While all other competitors are stuck rapping gangsta style or recycling old classic rock tunes with “uh-uhing” vocals over the top, Chilly has produced a groundbreaking record. His only obvious peers are Beck and Eminem, but this record is a much more contorted beast. Whether sampling, rapping, aping or dissing, Chilly is always one step ahead of the rap pack, which causes everyone else to seem tame. The album swerves from serious jokes to cold calculated art murder. Chilly attacks everything and makes no apologies. He raps: “And if this sounds like Eminem, well it does cause I can sound like any of them.” tinymixtapes

Eels – Mr E’s Beautiful Blues Perhaps the most sarcastic song in a career made up of as much sneering contempt as soul-bearing sincerity – and perhaps Eels’ biggest hit outside of ‘Novocaine’ or ‘Cancer’ – with the chorus “Goddamn right it’s a beautiful day” counterpointing lyrics like “the smokestack spitting black soot into the sooty sky” and “the load on the road brings a tear to the Indian’s eye” diymag

The Doves – Here it Comes Lost Souls is, at its very core, a mid-tempo rock record. But its songs do surge, swell and peak in the same way that good dance music does. Only rather than carefree euphoria, the feelings driving it are loneliness and regret… Crucially, though, Lost Souls never feels sorry for itself, never becomes morose. In fact, even at its lowest points, it always has a sense of Sub Sub’s old spirit-lifting energy bubbling through… it is, then, an album built on sadness. But it’s a majestic sadness. And, after many dozens of listens, it still moves and invigorates me. I certainly can’t think of an album I’d rather wallow in. theguardian

Coldplay – Don’t Panic featured on one of the definitive indie rock sets of the early 2000s: the soundtrack to Garden State. The lead track from Parachutes never opens up into a sing-along like “Yellow” or “Trouble” from Coldplay’s first album; instead, it stays soft and introverted like a Shins cast-off, addressing the apocalypse with a resigned sigh rather than an arena-ready shout. “Don’t Panic” offered Coldplay a quieter path than the one their career eventually took, but it certainly could have changed a few lives, a la “New Slang” billboard

Super Furry Animals – Ymaelodi Â’r Ymylon Having established themselves as true adventurers with their first three albums for Creation Records, Super Furry Animals did something astonishing with Mwng; they turned the volume down, sang in their native Welsh and, despite predictions of commercial suicide, made the biggest selling Welsh language album ever – Aled Jones, eat your heart out. thelineofbestfit

The Beta Band – To You Alone opens with a bellowing bass pulse and tantric humming before stuttering into epileptic beats and a plaintive keyboard melody. The song punches a hole through the back of TLC’s “No Scrubs”, rips out the spine, and reconstructs an interstellar psychedelic booty call pitchfork

King Biscuit Time – I Walk The Earth baggy updated for a new century, loops of gentle grooves shadowing Mason’s soft melodies. It’s The Beta Band with a clear head and a grand plan, The Stone Roses gone lo-fi and enjoying the liberation nme

Cat Power – I Found a Reason might actually make you weep until Marshall comes back around to lick your wounds, all in under two minutes. You can call me a wuss or say it’s because I’m a girl– keep in mind that I didn’t shed a tear at Saving Private Ryan, which some critic apparently called “wound-porn”– but Cat Power’s The Covers Record is the real deal, the embodiment of wound-porn. Buy it now; hide it under your mattress pitchfork

Johnny Cash – The Mercy Seat The song, which tells the story of a man about to be executed by the electric chair, sums up Cave’s ability to depict autobiographical tales within his writing while references to religion become yet more prevalent. Widely regarded as some of Cave’s finest work, ‘Mercy Seat’ has lasted the test of time while celebrated by some of the biggest names in the business…. Cash, having heard Cave’s song while learning about executions in Texas, commented: “If a man’s been there 25 years, maybe we should consider whether or not he has become a good human being and do we still want to kill him,” while discussing the debate of capital punishment. faroutmagazine

Six By Seven – Eat Junk Become Junk A profoundly grim record made grimmer still by Two Lone Swordsmen and Zan Lyons, both of whom filter out Six By Seven’s distinctive features – tune, shouting, cheap fucking lager, scabby roll-ups, God-this-country’s-gone-to-the-dogs-rage – in a bid to transform ‘Eat Junk Become Junk’ into nothing more depressing than the sonic equivalent of a rain-sodden and windswept grey October morning nme

Ladytron – Playgirl Early on, Pitchfork contributor Stephen Troussé off-handedly described Ladytron as the second coming of Elastica. It was a good enough comparison for me to remember it a decade later. Like Elastica, Ladytron are a co-ed band built on detachment, androgyny, black clothing, and tons of hooks. Also like Elastica, they were dogged at the start as being vacant fashionistas photocopying the past. A few blinks of the eye later, and Ladytron have been around for a dozen years pitchfork

David Kitt – There Are Words Small moments, maybe, but certainly not inconsequential. David Kitt deals in hushed acoustic arpeggios, half-heard synth ambience, stumbling programmed drum loops. It’s not a sound which impacts with any great fanfare, but every little whispery glitch, drum flare, and keyboard buzz builds to a graceful sum greater than its makeshift parts. nme

Mazarin – Chasing The Girl Have you ever been trampolining, bouncing happily away and looking up at the sky and wondered if it might be possible to jump a bit higher? Maybe even to reach escape velocity, slip the earth’s gravitational pull and just keep on flying? It’s physically impossible of course, but – hey – it’s a beautiful afternoon, why not give it a try anyway? Philadelphia’s Mazarin, aka Quentin Stoltzfus, would make the perfect soundtrack to those moments of graceful whimsy. And thankfully without a hairslide or a duffel bag in sight. He’s a man who knows the beauty of moments, you know: dogs smiling, unexpected phone calls from ex-lovers which somehow pour oil on stormy emotional waters, that kind of thing. nme

The Lucksmiths – T-Shirt Weather Exuberant, isn’t it ?  From the opening chords – pretty frenetic by The Lucksmiths’ standards – this song wants you to come out and play.  It’s a day with no commitments, cycling through the suburbs to find a friend with the wind careening through your hair: “Hey Mike, you busy? All this sunshine’s making me dizzy” backseatmafia

The Czars – Val The simple beauty of “Before… but longer” becomes apparent right from the first track, swelling from a simple atmospheric guitar backing with calming intense and melancholic vocal harmonies drownedinsound

I Am Kloot – Twist Lyrically, the record’s great. Explicit and honest and a master of metaphor, Bramwell is, in his own way, as fine a wordsmith as Morrissey or Stuart Murdoch. There are oddly poetic phrases here, shrouded in a multiplicity of possible meanings, that will nag at you forever. ”There’s blood on your legs”, presses Bramwell in ‘Twist’. ”I love you” nme

Clearlake – Winterlight Who could’ve imagined that grown men would weep at a song about a car boot sale that rips off the theme from Last Of The Summer Wine? Hear ‘Jumble Sailing’ and blub. Or that a seven-minute searing, sun-scorched guitar maelstrom could be inspired by a Brighton sunset? Yet here’s the gut-quaking ‘Winterlight’ nme

Gorkys Zygotic Mynci – Face Like Summer subtle swells of emotion rather than the slap in the face “cheer up, you old bugger” bubblegum indiepop that you’d expect when people describe “feelgood” music. drownedinsound

Tim “Love” Lee – Go Down Dixie narcoleptic country haze allmusic

Trembling Blue Stars – Ripples Opening with lingering bird chirps and a softly picked acoustic guitar, “Ripples” soon erupts into emotively detached guitar pop reminiscent of ’80s balladeering. Wratten intones: “I want to write songs about/ Two strangers starting out“. pitchfork

Joy Zipper – Check Out My New Jesus Each pensive, dreamy song manages to be part of an intrinsic whole without being redundant. This lovely album will appeal to anyone who enjoys beautifully layered pop music. allmusic

Low – In Metal a simply crushing Parker-sung ode to she and Sparhawk’s new baby, Hollis. Parker’s chilling voice, as she confesses her hopeless longing for the child to stay small forever, simultaneously attains both heartbreakingly desperation and jubilance: “Partly hate to see you grow/ And just like your baby shoes/ Wish I could keep your little body/ In metal.” There’s a bizarre David Lynch quality to the concept of immortalizing a baby in some kind of Han Solo freeze that prevents the song from crossing over into blatant sentimentalism. But Parker’s affection for the child, who can be heard squeaking at low levels during the song’s first verse, is not feigned. pitchfork

JJ72 – Oxygen Dublin’s bumfluff-faced threesome are keeping the emotive but dull guitar music vibe alive. Hell, they even have the barefaced cheek to rhyme “you and I” with “we’re going so high”. Apparently the young lovers in the song don’t need oxygen. Medics and biology teachers may beg to differ. As will their old English teachers when they hear this and realise that their former pupils have failed to grasp the twin concepts of bathos and pathos. nme

Saint Etienne – How We Use To Live slow, spoken word passages, low in the mix, add a necessary note of menace to the proto-Girls Aloud pop. “Up the riverbank and under the viaduct“, she monotones, “the causeway full of nice cars, the sand a distant dream . . .” before her words tumble into misty sentences that are impossible to discern — something about a hijack, a cinema, thoughts swirling in the sounds, memories whirling in the ether. thequietus

Alan Braxe & Fred Falke – Intro samples a lighter-than-air vocal riff from an ‘80s R&B record (maybe S.O.S. Band, I’m not quite certain), which is set upon a body-rockin’ Jane Fonda-in-a-leotard bassline and dressed with some pop-and-lock’d percussive maneuvers stylusmagazine

Modest Mouse – 3rd Planet Brock kicks off the record by announcing, “Everything that keeps me together is falling apart.” The simple chord progression performed an acoustic guitar sets the tone for an entire album of ups and downs filled with a cocktail of different emotions

Idlewild – These Wooden Ideas Charmingly Luddite stuff, as Roddy and his fellow noble artisans break off from a hard day’s whittling in their bothy to lambast everything fake and unemotional in this cruel and cynical world of ours. “It’s a better way to feel/Don’t be real, be postmodern”, he sings and, while you could argue about whether irony is the best way of attacking ironists, there’s a likeable righteousness to ‘These Wooden Ideas’ and its scolding of the arched-eyebrow pop mafia. nme

Grand Drive – Farewell To The Past lovingly crafted music rooted in downtown bars, rocky mountains and the country-rock of Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris theguardian

The White Stripes – Hello Operator You can count on one hand the number of times Jack ceded the spotlight to someone else during his Stripes tenure, and it was usually for something slightly confounding. When he briefly steps aside in “Hello Operator,” though, it makes complete sense. But it’s no less surprising, as in, John Szymanski’s blistering harmonica bum-rush can literally startle you. His clinically efficient cameo is the connective tissue linking this brittle-yet-bouncy blues update with a jamming-on-the-patio past, making for an inspired moment of harmony. stereogum

Noonday Underground – London a hybrid of ’60s psychedelic and quirky cocktail, Self-Assembly is an array of exotic indie and swinging dance-pop allmusic

Cinerama – Wow the 11 tracks are delectably embellished with accordions, vibes, flutes, horns, strings, and keyboards…. Disco Volante is a treat, an unassuming melange of ’60s pop styles that’s disarmingly sweet and consistently endearing. It’s a logical sidestep away from The Wedding Present that neither lets listeners forget Gedge’s rock roots nor lets them be missed. music.avclub

Harper Lee – Dry Land popmatters

Yo La Tengo – Our Way To Fall Kaplan and Hubley have a great knack for writing love songs that are tender and poignant but never schmaltzy. It might sound weird to commend the restraint of a band that’s partially known for very long jams and almost comical contortions during Kaplan’s unhinged guitar solos, but there’s always been a strong streak of restraint running through the band, and “Our Way to Fall” is a fantastic example of that. Like most of And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, this song avoids the noise and distortion and focuses on ethereal organ and acoustic guitar strums, underpinned with brushed drums and McNew’s bass melodies, as Kaplan sings about the early days of his relationship with Hubley. pastemagazine