current issue

TOP 60 ALBUMS 1993-2003

20 R.E.M.
New Adventures In Hi-Fi
(Warner Bros.), 1996
Hey, kids, rock ‘n’ roll? Well, that didn’t quite work out the last time, now did it? Stunned by the unanimous two-star reviews that greeted 1994’s big-riff epic Monster, R.E.M. set out to be not only one of the world’s biggest bands but also one of its most ambitious. Besides, when nobody tells you where to go (and you wouldn’t take their conference call even if they did), you can always drift out West and dream up a near-flawless collection of pastoral ballads and glam-rock flashbacks while winding around Mulholland Drive in the back of your limousine. Bonus points for picking up Patti Smith along the way. (Trevor Kelley)

19 Strokes
Is This It
(RCA), 2001
Wanna make a bet? When we’re old and gray, with retirement funds, there will be radio stations (or video brain-feeds or whatever) dedicated entirely to our music. These stations will not merely play our avowed favorites backward and forward, but, through careful psychoanalysis, will figure out what we really want: the Strokes. After all the denials, recriminations, drunken brawls and other results of being overhyped, Is This It is a near-perfect rock ‘n’ roll album, from its emotional range (dispassionate to annoyed) and its sonic depth (hooks, beats and fuzz everywhere) to, of course, the dreamy players themselves. (J. Gabriel Boylan)

18 Dirty Three
Horse Stories
(Touch And Go), 1996
Australians invent forlorn booty music, as the epic Horse Stories slices myriad tones (raga, Celtic, Asian) with its apologetic machete. The album’s climaxes maintain an uncanny, organic ferocity; their lyriclessness confounds the listener with contradictory free-associations. Just when instrumental music buttoned its shirt too high, Mick Turner commenced massaging his inner troll with a guitar pick, Jim White used his brushes to build and demolish houses of cards and Warren Ellis ran a bow across his exposed nerves. Horse Stories is the soundtrack to The Last Temptation Of Christ 2, in which godboy chooses damnation. (William Bowers)

17 Weezer
Pinkerton
(DGC), 1996
Act II: Fade To Black. Tired of having sex but never getting any, Rivers Cuomo turned Weezer’s second album into his own theater of pain, filling it with dramatic power pop that’s so freaked-out and forlorn that no one even batted an eyelash when the kids got up and left. But then there were the Get Up Kids (who took notes and bought a program) and a five-year panic attack that changed everything. After Pinkerton, beards were grown, emo was reinterpreted and Cuomo began writing bland radio fodder while lounging poolside at Fred Durst’s place. Good for him: At least he finally got laid. (Trevor Kelley)

16 Mercury Rev
Deserter’s Songs
(V2), 1998
They’re doing drugs on the album cover. Mercury Rev got its big Gs, got its hash pipe and perceptively blew open the doors to the widescreen Americana of Charles Ives and Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Of course, there’s also Jonathan Donahue’s heliumated T.Rex vocals, singing saws, a nicking of the melody line from “Silent Night” and the enlistment of two members of the Band to seal the album in a lysergic dream state. If you accept the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin as a sermon of sunny optimism, then Deserter’s Songs (like Bulletin, produced by Dave Fridmann) is its moonlit, magical sister. (Matthew Fritch)

15 Ween
White Pepper
(Elektra), 2000
If this is a Ween record, where’s the joke? Is the intergalactic psychedelia of opener “Exactly Where I’m At” an ironic fusion of the Fixx and Alan Parsons Project? Is the album title a euphemism for cocaine? There are some funny moments on White Pepper—bawdy cakewalk “Pandy Fackler” and the Club Med calypso of “Bananas And Blow” among them—but mostly, it’s Ween’s great, straight-faced pop album. “Even If You Don’t” sounds like a collaboration with Andy Partridge following a night filled with pot and dick jokes, while “Stay Forever” and “She’s Your Baby” are downright purty. (Patrick Berkery)

14 Grandaddy
The Sophtware Slump
(V2), 2000
Picture the opening shot of American Beauty with its aerial view of a suburban subdivision: a glittering, sun-kissed mosaic of the 21st-century mundane. This is Grandaddy’s vibe, where the point-and-click future meets the campfire folk-strum archaic in a haze of electric-light orchestration—and we all sit around fat and dazed, wondering aloud if that’s all there is to a millennium. If you listen closely, you can hear—rising above the low-din hissing of summer lawns and the raga drone of riding mowers—Jason Lytle’s precious melancholic warble asking the question: Do robots dream of electric sheep? Sure sounds like it. (Jonathan Valania)

13 Calexico
The Black Light
(Quarterstick), 1998
If you tabulated all the gallons of water it would take to fill Tucson’s parched arroyos, added in the stars visible in the Arizona nighttime sky and then, for good measure, tallied a few tons’ worth of Sonoran sand, you still wouldn’t match the numbers notched by Calexico’s second LP in terms of sonic expanse, musical depth and artistic fearlessness. From unerringly romantic gypsy canciones and mariachi mini-symphonies to sun-bleached folk-twang of a distinctively la droga psicodélica bent, The Black Light seems ancient and weathered, yet contemporary and fresh. Desert noir, by any other name. (Fred Mills)

12 Elliott Smith
XO
(DreamWorks), 1998
Elliott Smith could’ve easily self-destructed after 1997’s Either/Or, confident that he’d taken the sensitive singer/songwriter model to its most worrisome depths without relinquishing a shred of indie credibility. Who knew the pockmarked prince of artfully rendered emotional dysfunction had more commercial ambition? XO, Smith’s follow-up to his Academy Award-nominated song from Good Will Hunting, ekes out a plush, no-cry zone where blistering bouts of self-analysis thrive and proliferate amid a dense canopy of ‘60s-pop symphonics, molasses-sweet melodies and whispery falsetto. This is existential worry in a chipper mood. (Hobart Rowland)

11 Wilco
Summerteeth
(Reprise), 1999
Americana acolytes cried treason at the time, but the brooding, personal noir of Summerteeth helped Jeff Tweedy shed his lingering image as Uncle Tupelo’s lighter half. It buries dark, often disturbing lyrics among sunny swaths of sound, achieving a beguiling, if sometimes uncomfortable, balance. Multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett steers the LP in manifold musical directions, from heavy-lidded soul to Spectorian flourishes. Variously echoing the Kinks, the kitchen-sink sonics of ELO and the confectionery flavor of Loaded-era Velvets, it’s domestic discord delivered with a bubblegum smile. Rarely has homefront alienation sounded so good. (Bob Mehr)

Next Page >>

60-51 50-41 40-31 30-21 20-11 10-1

	TOP 60 ALBUMS 1993-2003
	20 R.E.M. New Adventures In Hi-Fi (Warner Bros.), 1996 Hey, kids, rock ‘n’ roll? Well, that didn’t quite work out the last time, now did it? Stunned by the unanimous two-star reviews that greeted 1994’s big-riff epic Monster, R.E.M. set out to be not only one of the world’s biggest bands but also one of its most ambitious. Besides, when nobody tells you where to go (and you wouldn’t take their conference call even if they did), you can always drift out West and dream up a near-flawless collection of pastoral ballads and glam-rock flashbacks while winding around Mulholland Drive in the back of your limousine. Bonus points for picking up Patti Smith along the way. (Trevor Kelley)
	19 Strokes Is This It (RCA), 2001 Wanna make a bet? When we’re old and gray, with retirement funds, there will be radio stations (or video brain-feeds or whatever) dedicated entirely to our music. These stations will not merely play our avowed favorites backward and forward, but, through careful psychoanalysis, will figure out what we really want: the Strokes. After all the denials, recriminations, drunken brawls and other results of being overhyped, Is This It is a near-perfect rock ‘n’ roll album, from its emotional range (dispassionate to annoyed) and its sonic depth (hooks, beats and fuzz everywhere) to, of course, the dreamy players themselves. (J. Gabriel Boylan)
	18 Dirty Three Horse Stories (Touch And Go), 1996 Australians invent forlorn booty music, as the epic Horse Stories slices myriad tones (raga, Celtic, Asian) with its apologetic machete. The album’s climaxes maintain an uncanny, organic ferocity; their lyriclessness confounds the listener with contradictory free-associations. Just when instrumental music buttoned its shirt too high, Mick Turner commenced massaging his inner troll with a guitar pick, Jim White used his brushes to build and demolish houses of cards and Warren Ellis ran a bow across his exposed nerves. Horse Stories is the soundtrack to The Last Temptation Of Christ 2, in which godboy chooses damnation. (William Bowers)
	17 Weezer Pinkerton (DGC), 1996 Act II: Fade To Black. Tired of having sex but never getting any, Rivers Cuomo turned Weezer’s second album into his own theater of pain, filling it with dramatic power pop that’s so freaked-out and forlorn that no one even batted an eyelash when the kids got up and left. But then there were the Get Up Kids (who took notes and bought a program) and a five-year panic attack that changed everything. After Pinkerton, beards were grown, emo was reinterpreted and Cuomo began writing bland radio fodder while lounging poolside at Fred Durst’s place. Good for him: At least he finally got laid. (Trevor Kelley)
	16 Mercury Rev Deserter’s Songs (V2), 1998 They’re doing drugs on the album cover. Mercury Rev got its big Gs, got its hash pipe and perceptively blew open the doors to the widescreen Americana of Charles Ives and Walt Disney’s Fantasia. Of course, there’s also Jonathan Donahue’s heliumated T.Rex vocals, singing saws, a nicking of the melody line from “Silent Night” and the enlistment of two members of the Band to seal the album in a lysergic dream state. If you accept the Flaming Lips’ The Soft Bulletin as a sermon of sunny optimism, then Deserter’s Songs (like Bulletin, produced by Dave Fridmann) is its moonlit, magical sister. (Matthew Fritch)
	15 Ween White Pepper (Elektra), 2000 If this is a Ween record, where’s the joke? Is the intergalactic psychedelia of opener “Exactly Where I’m At” an ironic fusion of the Fixx and Alan Parsons Project? Is the album title a euphemism for cocaine? There are some funny moments on White Pepper—bawdy cakewalk “Pandy Fackler” and the Club Med calypso of “Bananas And Blow” among them—but mostly, it’s Ween’s great, straight-faced pop album. “Even If You Don’t” sounds like a collaboration with Andy Partridge following a night filled with pot and dick jokes, while “Stay Forever” and “She’s Your Baby” are downright purty. (Patrick Berkery)
	14 Grandaddy The Sophtware Slump (V2), 2000 Picture the opening shot of American Beauty with its aerial view of a suburban subdivision: a glittering, sun-kissed mosaic of the 21st-century mundane. This is Grandaddy’s vibe, where the point-and-click future meets the campfire folk-strum archaic in a haze of electric-light orchestration—and we all sit around fat and dazed, wondering aloud if that’s all there is to a millennium. If you listen closely, you can hear—rising above the low-din hissing of summer lawns and the raga drone of riding mowers—Jason Lytle’s precious melancholic warble asking the question: Do robots dream of electric sheep? Sure sounds like it. (Jonathan Valania)
	13 Calexico The Black Light (Quarterstick), 1998 If you tabulated all the gallons of water it would take to fill Tucson’s parched arroyos, added in the stars visible in the Arizona nighttime sky and then, for good measure, tallied a few tons’ worth of Sonoran sand, you still wouldn’t match the numbers notched by Calexico’s second LP in terms of sonic expanse, musical depth and artistic fearlessness. From unerringly romantic gypsy canciones and mariachi mini-symphonies to sun-bleached folk-twang of a distinctively la droga psicodélica bent, The Black Light seems ancient and weathered, yet contemporary and fresh. Desert noir, by any other name. (Fred Mills)
	12 Elliott Smith XO (DreamWorks), 1998 Elliott Smith could’ve easily self-destructed after 1997’s Either/Or, confident that he’d taken the sensitive singer/songwriter model to its most worrisome depths without relinquishing a shred of indie credibility. Who knew the pockmarked prince of artfully rendered emotional dysfunction had more commercial ambition? XO, Smith’s follow-up to his Academy Award-nominated song from Good Will Hunting, ekes out a plush, no-cry zone where blistering bouts of self-analysis thrive and proliferate amid a dense canopy of ‘60s-pop symphonics, molasses-sweet melodies and whispery falsetto. This is existential worry in a chipper mood. (Hobart Rowland)
	11 Wilco Summerteeth (Reprise), 1999 Americana acolytes cried treason at the time, but the brooding, personal noir of Summerteeth helped Jeff Tweedy shed his lingering image as Uncle Tupelo’s lighter half. It buries dark, often disturbing lyrics among sunny swaths of sound, achieving a beguiling, if sometimes uncomfortable, balance. Multi-instrumentalist Jay Bennett steers the LP in manifold musical directions, from heavy-lidded soul to Spectorian flourishes. Variously echoing the Kinks, the kitchen-sink sonics of ELO and the confectionery flavor of Loaded-era Velvets, it’s domestic discord delivered with a bubblegum smile. Rarely has homefront alienation sounded so good. (Bob Mehr)