Presented in no particular order and without comment, here's the rest of the stuff that made this decade a lot better than Time Magazine would have you believe:

The Hold Steady: Separation Sunday

Dirty Projectors: Bitte Orca

The Gourds: Cow Fish Fowl or Pig

New Pornographers: Challengers

Josh Ritter: Hello Starling

Josh Rouse: 1972

Drive By Truckers: Brighter than Creation's Dark

The Hold Steady: Stay Positive

Art Brut: Bang Bang Rock & Roll

Lupe Fiasco: Food and Liquor

Brian Wilson: Smile

Ron Sexsmith: Exit Strategy of the Soul

Drive By Truckers: A Blessing and a Curse

Sufjan Stevens: Illinois

Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros: Global a-Go-Go

Neko Case: Fox Confessor Brings the Flood

Soundtrack: I'm Not There

Lambchop: Nixon

Roll with You: Eli Reed and the Paperboys

Spoon: Gimme Fiction

XTC: Wasp Star: Apple Venus, Vol. 2

Laura Viers: Saltbreakers

Okkervil River: The Stage Names

Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane: Live at Carnegie Hall

Accelerate: R.E.M.

White Stripes: White Blood Cells

Fleet Foxes: Fleet Foxes

Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins: Rabbit Fur Coat

Bon Iver: For Emma, Forever Ago

Joe Henry: Scar

Randy Newman: Harps and Angels

Wilco: Sky Blue Sky

Avett Brothers: I and Love and You

Dirty Projectors: Rise Above

The Bad Plus: Prog

Loretta Lynn: Van Lear Rose

Paul Simon: Surprise

Midlake: The Trials of Von Occupanther

Radiohead: In Rainbows

Josh Ritter: The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter

Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

Dr. Dog: Fate

The Wood Brothers: Ways Not to Lose

Lay It Down: Al Green

Kings of Leon: Youth and Young Manhood

She & Him: She & Him

Girl Talk: Feed the Animals

 

 

Considering how straight-ahead/major key/easily accessible the Hold Steady's third album, Boys and Girls in America, is, I have to say that is was for some reason a grower for me. It was the first disc that Fresh and I reviewed for the Chicken Dinner Newspaper, and maybe I was just trying too hard to listen like a critic. But no matter, once this record got its hooks in me, it never really let go. In December 2006 I was giving a bit of a shrug; in February 2007 I found myself humming "You Can Make Him Like You" while Mrs. Q was looking at picture frames at Ikea. By the time spring had rolled around I was listening to it on repeat in the car for days on end. Since then I've seen the group twice, which is purt-near a Herculean feat for a guy who doesn't make it to 10:30 p.m. all that much anymore.

Sure, by the time Boys and Girls came around, the Hold Steady had introduced enough bar-band big beat into their act that it was sure to resonate with an old-timey guy like me. But even so, Craig Finn brings a novelist's touch to his tales of teenage wastelandery and pill-fueled mayhem. He's become one of the smartest lyricists in rock, and I find his efforts to sing a bit more (rather than just make like a Midwestern Mark E. Smith) to be more than welcome.

Is the group's preceding Separation Sunday a "better" album? Hard to say, and it was certainly a contender for this list, but I'm giving the advantage to Boys and Girls in America if for no other reason than it's the disc that yanked me out of my vintage vinyl comfort zone and back into the modern age. It might not have been that far of a trip, but it was just what a guy who was looking at the wrong side of forty needed.

03 Hot Soft Light.mp3

If you had asked me a few years ago, I would have told you that the Gourds were on their way to much bigger things. Like most people, I first heard about the group via their cover of Snoop Dogg's "Gin and Juice." Unlike most people, though, I wasn't under the impression that it was Phish performing (thanks for nothing, mislabeled Napster files!). As I went digging, I discovered that this was a terrific roots-rock group led by two accomplished songwriters, Jimmy Smith and Kev Russell. And when Bolsa de Agua dropped in September 2000, I was convinced that it was just a matter of time before more folks got on the trolley.

 

From the first seconds of the first track, "El Paso," I was swept away. I was reminded of course of the Band, and their lyrics reminded me of Dylan at his most playful. They're lyrics that your brain wants to chew on like Bazooka, and they're also surprisingly literate. They even pilfer a bit from Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca for "Flamenco Cabaret" and tackle religion here and there ("Jesus Christ with Signs Following," "Hallelujah Shine").

 

Over the years, it seems that their bluegrass proficiency may have attracted the attention of the jam-band crowd. Maybe that does the band a disservice (or maybe I'm being overly intolerant of jam-bands*), but it has made me slightly less reluctant to shout my Gourds love from the rooftops. Still and all, they've made consistently good, and occasionally great, albums throughout the decade, and they belong at the #2 spot if for no other reason than the fact that just about everyone I've played this record for has become a convert. That's tough to do in this increasingly fragmented age.

09 Hallelujah Shine.mp3

*No, I'm not.

If you know me, you know this was pretty well unavoidable. There was bound to be some Bob on this list somewhere. But even if I weren't a touch obsessed with our boy Zimmy, this album was bound to be contender regardless.

The 1980s and '90s were a difficult time for Dylan. He was releasing terrible albums, his live shows were a shambles, and he was well on his way toward squandering his status as a rock pioneer. Plenty of people my age and younger were writing him off altogether. But then something extraordinary occurred -- Bob Dylan found his voice again. In 1997 he released Time Out of Mind, a dark rumination on mortality that stands among his very best work.

Of course, Bob's done this to us before; he's followed up rubbish with brilliance and then just as quickly reverted back to rubbish. So while optimism was cautious at best when the time came for a follow-up, there was good reason to be cheerful when he released Love and Theft, a far lighter affair that replaced the swampy bubblings of Time Out of Mind with dashes of rockabilly, gutsy, uptempo blues and pre-rock croonery.

I'll never forget the morning I first heard it, in fact. It was the day the album came out. I drove along under a cerulean blue sky, my fingers tapping on the steering wheel as I made my way to my job as a news guy. As I moseyed in, still humming a bit of "Summer Days," I was puzzled by the tension in people's faces. September 11, 2001.

03 Summer Days.mp3

It's a little hard not to link the two in my mind, but Love and Theft was the album that I'd turn to when the 9/11 news, and the ensuing "analysis," got to be too much. With its references to knock-knock jokes, booty calls and Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dee, it still offers a welcome respite.

This is going to sound like heresy to some people, but I've had a sense that Tom Waits spent a lot of this decade treading water. Blood Money, Alice and Real Gone are fine albums, but how much they really add to Waits' repertoire is debatable. I can say I haven't dug them out all that often since I first bought them. But as soon as I heard about Orphans, this inveterate Waits bootleg collector was intrigued. Collecting the stray tracks from compilations and soundtracks and adding leftover songs from previous albums in one three-disc set, Waits is creating an alternate history of his post-Island career. And while the results might make for a collection too rich to take in all at once, it's great fun to dip into.

For a while there, it seemed that no tribute albums could be released without Waits contributing a track. Orphans offers his take on acts as diverse as Kurt Weill and the Ramones, plus songs that appeared on the soundtrack to everything from Dead Man Walking to Shrek 2.

The set is divided between Brawlers (tougher, bluesier numbers), Bawlers (tender ballads) and Bastards (selections from Waits' own cavalcade of human oddities). You'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll probably also get a little creeped out. Regardless of which Waits you're in the mood for. Sometimes it takes a good closet cleaning to get the inspiration flowing again. Orphans has me looking forward to wherever Waits' muse takes him next.

16 Take Care of All My Children.wma

Throughout the sad and fetid 1990s, there was a real sense among indie types that you had to play it dumb. The idea of anything as ambitious as a rock opera was completely laughable -- the whole thing would smack of effort. As the decade turned, the trends turned more toward your more well-scrubbed literate types, and it ended up getting a mite too twee up in here. The new groups might be more willing to take on a bigger challenge, but the results would probably involve 18th century whaling towns or a man who loves and owl or some such nonsense. But the #5 album, the Drive-By Truckers' Southern Rock Opera, manages to plow right down the middle sweet spot between ambition and earthiness.

By taking the mythos surrounding boogie boys Lynyrd Skynyrd and using it to illustrate one young man's relationship with the South, its people and its culture, chief Trucker Patterson Hood created an American Quadrophenia. Hood wrestles with the stereotypes that exist, and in the process moved the band from a borderline alt-country novelty act up into the next tier of songwriters. Along the way, Hood is ably abetted by his longtime counterpart/secret weapon Mike Cooley, who turns in songs that perfectly complement the storyline, even if they don't necessarily further the "plot" of the opera.

To my way of thinking, the Truckers would extend their songwriting further on later albums, especially A Blessing and a Curse. But this initial leap forward, conceived and recorded just as the decades were changing hands, is what merits inclusion on the big list.

01 Let There Be Rock.mp3

I didn't realize until I made this list, but I spent a goodly amount of time rocking hard in the '00s. And by hard I mean hard, baby. Underneath my staid personality, apparently, lay a street-walking cheetah with a heart full of napalm. A coiled spring. A powderkeg of reckless abandon cleverly disguised as a suburban middle aged doofus. Thunder in a teapot, man, a permanent tidal wave in a notion of dynamite.

Or something like that.

Here we are at #6 on the Best of the Decade, Up the Bracket, and I'm chair dancing and head nodding my way into what passes for a frenzy in this cubicle. Combining punk smashery with that peculiar brand of English melodicism places, for this listener, the Libertines in the chain of great Brit-rockers, from the early Who and Kinks to the Buzzcocks and Jam to these guys to -- what? The Arctic Monkeys first album? That's about as close as I've gotten since the Libertines split.

The Libertines' first album proffered, like the Sex Pistols and the New York Dolls before them, a manifesto that required no further comment (even though they made one anyway). The poppy chord progressions are proof that they weren't the slopmeisters that they'd have you believe. They also weren't afraid to swing a little (on "Begging," for instance) or even come over a little McCartneyesque, as on the cheekily acoustic "Radio America."

But it's the bracing rockers that will make this a fixture in my player for years to come. Songs such as "Vertigo," "Horrorshow," and "The Boy Looked at Johnny" kept a worn-down 30something guy from giving up on the rock in 2002, and I expect it will be a similarly potent tonic in 2032.

The Boy Looked At Johnny.mp3

Although I'm pretty sure I end up on some sort of watchlist every time I type this group's name into the Internet, my #7 pick, The New Pornographers' Twin Cinema has become a go-to album whenever I need a shot of adrenaline to get me through my working day. The key here is the opening/title track.

As someone who tends to listen to albums in their entirety (except when I'm on the treadmill), that opening track makes all the difference. Call it instant gratification, but if that side 1/track 1 sets just the mood you're looking for, then Bob's your uncle. Even if the follow-up track ("The Bones of an Idol") takes the mood down considerably, "Twin Cinema" (the song) has just the right stomp and sass to convince me to throw this disc on. I'm never disappointed.

Lyrically, I have very little idea what these people are on about, and I suspect they don't either, but it's always fun to hear them declaim such borderline nonsense with such certitude. ¡Viva ironic fist-pumpery!

01 Twin Cinema

In the late 1990s I worked in a record store, so I got pretty well acquainted with the new releases and the modern sounds that the young people were digging. During the first part of the '00s, though, I found myself firmly ensconced in the past, and owning a vintage vinyl shop for a couple years only walled me off further from the present. Since then, I've had a pretty good time catching up.

As much as I've enjoyed reconnecting with contemporary music during this decade, though, I still find myself drawn toward artists and albums that wear their connections to the past on their sleeves, and my #8 pick, Cat Power's The Greatest does just that. Incorporating veterans from Al Green's old band (Teenie Hodges!) might have struck some as a blatant cred grab, and if the songs hadn't measured up it might have been. They do, though, and the result is a beautiful mix of classic soul and indie pop. The little touches of torchiness ("Where Is My Love") and honky-tonkery ("After It All") keep the cohesiveness from slipping into bland sameness.

The Greatest was Chan Marshall's first album of all-original material, and at the time it seemed very much like an artist coming into her own. Curiously, I was very much looking forward to her all-covers follow-up, Jukebox, and while I enjoy that one overall, it's this album that I'll carry with me into future decades.

Lived In Bars

I don't remember exactly which year the band I was in opened for the Flaming Lips, but I do recall two things about the evening.

1. They were so loud that the police showed up during the sound check (the song they played was a cover of A Flock of Seagulls' "Space Age Love Song").
2. I stayed in the other room that night and worked the merch table instead of checking them out.

I think I was a little burned out on alt-rock by that time, and the Flaming Lips hadn't made their move toward the almost Wings-esque sounds of 1999's The Soft Bulletin, so perhaps I can be forgiven for my philistinism.

Even so, I doubt it would have adequately set me up for the one-two punch of Soft Bulletin and the album I'm including here, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots. Maybe it just came along at the right time; Mrs. Q and I had just closed up our vintage vinyl shop and I had just started a new job when I first heard this disc, which wears its melancholy so proudly.

The critic Nik Cohn has a line about Pet Sounds where he describes that album as "sad songs about sadness and sad songs about happiness." That seems apt here as well. The obvious standout track here is "Do You Realize??" in which lead singer/superfluous punctuation enthusiast Wayne Coyne offers up a bit of stoner wisdom and in the process creates my pick for the song of the decade (there, I said it). (I first heard this track a couple years before I heard the disc in its entirety, as I was going through a few other tumultuous upheavals, but that's a story for another time.)

So in the end, this might not be the most adventurous pick on this list, but in many ways it's the most personal. We got diminishing returns from the group with their next album, At War with the Mystics, but Yoshimi more than ensures the Lips' place in the pantheon.

09 Do You Realize--.mp3