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This is from the new Esquire:
21st Century Rock
Chuck Klosterman celebrates twenty-one high-quality albums from the past three years (in no particular order)
by Chuck Klosterman | May 01 '05
I listen to modern rock 'n' roll music. This is because I don't have a real job.
People who have real jobs don't listen to contemporary rock music. People who have real jobs watch network TV and go to sleep; that's pretty much their entire social life. A month after Morrissey released Maladjusted in 1997, I called the most intense heterosexual Morrissey fan I knew, and I said, "You know, critics are attacking this record for being sonically maudlin and lyrically lazy, but there are some interesting songs here. It's not as deep as Vauxhall and I , but it's worth buying."
His response: "Morrissey still makes records?"
Of course, this was coming from an electrical engineer with a family and a dog named Simon and a house he hasn't paid for; he stopped listening to new music in late 1995. Whenever he tries to listen to the radio, all the new music sounds ridiculous. And this is because new music always sounds ridiculous to anyone who quit buying records when he was twenty-six. The moment you stop buying music is the moment it becomes alienating. That's why everyone insists that most good music was (coincidentally) recorded between their sophomore year in high school and their senior year of college.
Luckily, this will never happen to me. This will never happen to me because I will never have a real job. In fact, I will listen to new music for you. Here are twenty-one albums that you can either a) buy or b) pretend to already like. Now, one warning: If you already consider yourself cool, don't read this article. This article is for people who realize they're no longer cool (and who sometimes worry about that realization, perhaps more than they are willing to admit).
1. The Hold Steady, Almost Killed Me (2004):
Hailing from uptown Minneapolis, the Hold Steady combines King Missile with Thin Lizzy, and somehow this record ends up feeling like an ironist's Born to Run . The singer (Craig Finn) likes to make up nicknames for people you've never met, including himself; he also hates guys who wear eye patches, and he's possibly the best lyricist of the past decade. You will like this album if you used to like AC/DC but now you just read a lot.
2. The Exploding Hearts, Guitar Romantic (2003):
Three members of this four-piece briefly became famous when they all died at once, in a van accident near Eugene, Oregon, in 2003. This is the best kind of punk rock—catchy, unobnoxious, danceable, and Clash-derivative. You will like this album if you are happy to be alive.
3. My Morning Jacket, It Still Moves (2003):
This is big, southern, drunken, heavily bearded power rock. The songs are long and wide and deep; the riffs feel like they were recorded in a studio inside Skylab (after it had started to fall). If the guys in Pink Floyd had been raised in Louisville, they would have made It Still Moves . You will like this album if you like flying-V guitars and grizzly bears.
4. Coachwhips, Peanut Butter and Jelly Live at the Ginger Minge (2005):
There is a lot to despise about this record, namely the title (which is both moronic and inaccurate, as the album is not live). The Coachwhips also have a tendency to dabble in the genre of noise rock, and that's almost always a recipe for cyclone-level disaster. Yet there is something about this record that captures time and space; it's like the soundtrack for a runaway horse carriage. I suspect that the Coachwhips wanted to make garage rock and accidentally turned into a thrash band, and the result is way better than if they had tried to do that on purpose. You will like this album if your problems with the White Stripes are with Jack (as opposed to Meg).
5. The Black Keys, The Big Come Up (2002):
This is a two-person blues band that is partially named after a color. I have no idea where they came up with this idea, but it seems to be working. The Black Keys have made two albums since The Big Come Up , but this is the one you should buy; they cover the Beatles and periodically sound like Moun-tain, which is an intriguing confluence of impractical influences. You will like this album if you support the reintroduction of blue-eyed, Mayallesque blues structures filtered through the artifice of slacker sloppiness, or if you used to work at the Akron Beacon Journal with the drummer's father, reporter Jim Carney.
6. Suffrajett, Suffrajett (2003):
This is a dirty record about sex and drugs, cowritten by a guitarist who used to cowrite Liz Phair songs (Jason Chasko) and sung by an exotic creature named Simi who sounds like she swallowed a tumbler of rock salt and Drano. It's low-fi grunge hair metal, which is kind of like calling someone a pragmatically cynical optimist. You will like this album if you tend to be frightened by the women you're attracted to.
7. Secret Machines, Now Here Is Nowhere (2004):
Sadly, the music on this opus does not accurately replicate the group's live performances, mostly because the drummer is an insane werewolf who hits his cymbals the way Mike Tyson hit Trevor Berbick's rib cage in 1986. You simply cannot record that kind of violence. Still, the first two songs on Now Here Is Nowhere are good enough to play anywhere at any time, especially if "anywhere" is your car and "any time" is 3:00 A.M. You will like this album if you still occasionally buy drugs.
8. Electric Six, Fire (2003):
At first blush, Fire sounds a little like joke rock (a quality accentuated by the fact that the band sent out a press release about their potential breakup before anyone even knew who the fuck they were). However, Fire is more like postmodern fashion rock, which means the singer is adopting all the clichès of arena metal because he honestly thinks they're cool (as opposed to the way singers in joke-rock bands adopt arena-metal clichès whenever they want to be funny). This makes the Electric Six fabricated and authentic at the same time. In other words, you will like this album if you like the notion of Van Halen more than you liked any of their actual albums.
9. The Hellacopters, Cream of the Crap! Vol. 2 (2005):
This is an anthology of distorted, up-tempo Swedish funeral dirges that includes a cover of "All American Man" (off side four of Kiss's Alive II ) and a cover of "Dirty Women" (off Black Sabbath's jazz-metal effort Technical Ecstasy ). Apparently, I am now a target market in Stockholm. You will like this album if you always think that music on classic-rock radio stations should be slightly faster and slightly louder.
10. The Thrills, So Much for the City (2003):
The Thrills are five guys from Ireland who are obsessed with the soulless iconography of California and the day-to-day lifestyle of Gram Parsons. In other words, they are all (probably) a bunch of drunks. The melodies on the record feel optimistic, but the words are jaded. The singer says we should never go back to Big Sur, but he never says what happened the last time we were there. You will like this album if your apartment is actually a bar.
11. Courtney Love, America's Sweetheart (2004):
Hole's Live Through This was released four days after Kurt Cobain's corpse was found by his electrician in 1994. As a consequence, critics spent ten years talking about how Live Through This was "overlooked," and how it was supposedly some kind of sublime, underrated classic. Which is weird, because it contained only three good songs. Meanwhile, everyone ripped on America's Sweetheart as an uneven, self-indulgent train wreck...but this is actually the first good record Courtney Love has ever made! You will like this album if you are writing a dissertation on metacommunicative discourse and/or crack whores.
12. Drive-By Truckers, Southern Rock Opera (2002):
When the boys in this band were growing up in Alabama, they loved Black Flag and hated the rednecks who blasted Lynyrd Skynyrd in the locker room before football practice. But then the Truckers left town and traveled America, only to realize that people who are not from the south do not understand the south. They had to reclaim southern rock in order to understand its larger truth. There is a song on this double CD ("Let There Be Rock") that's as sincere as anything ever written by Neil Young or Ronnie Van Zant...which, according to their song "Ronnie and Neil," should be the core purpose of rock music. You will like this album if you like America.
13. The Fiery Furnaces, Gallowsbird's Bark (2003):
A brother and sister from Illinois who seem like they should be from Eastern Europe, Matthew and Eleanor Friedberger create the kind of music that makes people say, "What the fuck is this?" And that's not because it's relentlessly inaccessible or unspeakably brilliant, but because this seems like such a strange vision for a band—it's raw, Velvet Undergroundy prog pop that occasionally includes the sound of birds chirping. You will like this album if you enjoy the music on NPR's Fresh Air more than anything else on the radio.
14. Gonga, Gonga (2004):
This band smokes so much pot that they weren't able to name two of the songs on their debut album; track 4 is called "Untitled No. 2," and track 8 is called "Untitled No. 3." I have no idea what happened to "Untitled No. 1." Perhaps it was converted into track 10, which is called "Octane Bud." This plutonium power riffage might be the heaviest record since the Melvins' Stoner Witch . You will like this album if you think Queens of the Stone Age kind of seem like pussies.
15. Wilco, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2002):
Last summer, Wilco released A Ghost Is Born , which I played about ten thousand times before publicly decreeing that it was the band's best record to date (and that it was more "interesting" than Yankee Hotel Foxtrot , which got media attention for nonmusical reasons). Then I went back and played this album again. It turns out I was completely wrong. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot is not as weird as A Ghost Is Born , but it's way more moving. "Jesus, Etc." is the most abstractly emotive song of the past decade, and I think "Ashes of American Flags" might be about raking the lawn. You will like this album if you ever have to rake the lawn.
16. Weezer, Maladroit (2002):
This is Weezer's most aggressively "metal" record even though none of it is remotely heavy. Which is good—"rock" should be heavy , but "metal" should be hard . You will like this album if you immediately understand the difference between those two things.
17. Elliott Smith, From a Basement on the Hill (2004):
This posthumous release is the one profoundly great Elliott Smith record, which isn't going to make it any easier to stop romanticizing artists who spend their entire careers waiting to commit suicide. You will like this album if you enjoy the hypothetical possibility of a really depressed Beatle.
18. Belle and Sebastian, Dear Catastrophe Waitress (2003):
This album sounds like it was recorded by a bunch of precocious third graders who like to frolic in the meadow with imaginary marmots and a bubble machine. In the Spike Lee movie 25th Hour , Edward Norton gets sentenced to prison and has to choose between two longtime friends, Barry Pepper and Philip Seymour Hoffman: One needs to beat him up so he'll look tough enough to survive in the hole (this ends up being Pepper), and the other has to look after his dog while Norton's locked away (this ends up being Hoffman). If you're the kind of guy who would be asked to kick the shit out of your own friend, you are probably not in Belle and Sebastian's core demographic. However, you will like this album if you're the kind of loyal companion who would be asked to take care of somebody's hound.
19. The New Pornographers, Electric Version (2003):
This is a band that makes tight, accessible, original, hook-laden pop music, and it is cofronted by a stone fox (Neko Case) who's dead sexy x 400. If you were trying to design a rock band for the sole purpose of being popular, this is the rock band you would create. However, nobody likes the New Pornographers except rock critics. It's like they're this indie-rock version of Blondie, and no one seems to care. You will like this album if you generally like things that are good.
20. Evan Dando, Baby I'm Bored (2003):
It's possible that you remember the Lemonheads as kind of bad, because many people seem to remember them in that context. In truth, the Lemonheads were often excellent (especially on It's a Shame About Ray ), and this goofy, lackadaisical solo effort from their former dreamboat vocalist is chock-full of likable material. Dando sounds like a drug addict, and that might be an act. But he's a good actor (as evidenced by his performance during the closing credits of Reality Bites ). You will like this album if you are nostalgic for the very recent past.
21. TV on the Radio, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes (2004):
This is an interesting record. Actually, that's not true. This is a bad record. This is a stupid doo-wop noise-pop record that (on occasion) accidentally sounds like Beck's Midnite Vultures . But you will like this album if you are trying to nail some superhot hipster chick in your office who only sleeps with cool guys.
Copyright © 1997-2005 by the Hearst Corporation.
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"To keep you is no benefit. To destroy you is no loss."
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