When I started looking back at the music of 2002, I wasn’t expecting it to be so psychedelic. It’s Aldous Huxley versus Pharrell, guys, and that’s a pretty good premise for a mid-level crop of albums.
Against my better judgment, I’m undertaking a project to determine my top 10 albums of every year since 1960. Instead of just picking my favorite stuff out of my collection, I intend to explore, re-visit and discover. While I can’t promise to leave no stone unturned, I am going to go deeper than I ever have before. Why would I partake in a journey that will inevitably take many years and that I ultimately may never finish? Most importantly, to uncover great music that I’ve never heard before. Second, to boost my knowledge of music history and get a sense of what was happening at a macro scale in a snapshot of time. Finally, I want to share my passion for music with you and, fingers crossed, generate a dialogue down in the comments. So without further ado, here is #34 in the series. My random number generator says that our next year to tackle will be 1995.
Check out my previous entries here.
The Greatest Albums of 2002
Writing Found or Forgotten has been a great way to challenge my preconceptions. Of course, that is a natural part of anyone’s musical journey. I don’t subscribe to the same musical opinions I held in high school because my tastes have naturally evolved, I have been exposed to more types of music over the years, and I no longer feel beholden to the taste of my peers when it comes to what I listen to. This blog has truly accelerated the process, though. Whenever I go back and look at the early entries into the series, it is not uncommon to see some assertion, typically of the negative variety, that I no longer agree with. Case in point: In my 2003 post (which I hesitate to link to since I think my writing has evolved at least as much as my taste) I posited that “I’m no fan of Timbaland, but…”, before going on to praise his beat for a particular Cee Lo Green track. Fairly innocuous opinion, but also one that was not well informed. I thought I didn’t like Timbaland because of my biases around authenticity in hip hop, as if I am somehow qualified to be the arbiter of that. In reality, he was simply different and innovative in a way that ran counter to the music I was naturally gravitating to at the time. I’ve also made the assertion in a prior post that the Neptunes were very talented, but didn’t typically collaborate with artists that I liked. Even more innocuous, really, but still an opinion that has been challenged by subsequent exploration. As it turns out, digging through the music of 2002 has helped me see how vibrant and exciting the work of these producers are, whether it’s on Missy Elliott’s Under Construction or Clipse’s Lord Willin’, or elsewhere that they popped up during this prolific period of their respective careers.
Once you create a narrative in your mind, it can be easy to see every example that conforms to that narrative as highly significant and every example that doesn’t as nothing more than an aberration, the exception that proves the rule. I have long subscribed to two prevailing narratives about music in the early 2000’s. The first is that hip hop was running along two diverging paths represented by the ultra-commercial and low-substance work of No Limit and post-Biggie Bad Boy, and the high-minded and live-instrumented collective of musicians loosely associated with the Soulquarians (the Roots, Common, various soul contemporaries like Musiq Soulchild and Erykah Badu). That narrative has a lot of truth to it, but it doesn’t allow for the artistic middle ground of the Neptunes and Timbaland, or even artists like Jay Z and Nas. In other words, this project is helping me short circuit all the shorthand my brain has created to compartmentalize and effectively ignore large swaths of music based on my assumptions about it. The other narrative, by the way, is that rock was, perhaps not dead, but largely dormant in this time period, barring the inescapably popular White Stripes and a couple of media-hyped garage rock revivalists that ultimately had negligible impact on the culture (e.g. The Vines, The Hives). Yet here we sit, with nearly half of my top ten albums falling into the rock genre and each one offering vastly different experiences for their listeners. When I conceived of this project I welcomed the opportunity to uncover some lost gems, particularly in the very early and largely unexplored years that I would be covering, but I largely expected this to be a document of my long-held thoughts on music. I’m delighted to find out that many of those opinions no longer hold water, especially as it results in an ever expanding appreciation of the music of the past.
Yankee Hotel Foxtrot – Wilco
By the early 2000’s, music fans had started to accept some experimentation in their mainstream releases. Rather, they had resumed accepting experimentation, as that was a common feature in much of the mainstream rock and soul of the 60’s and 70’s. The subsequent two decades, however, found popular artists really staying in their lane. The individual forms of music evolved, of course, but they tended to evolve collectively, with albums of a certain genre adhering to the formal expectations of that genre. So, while Motley Crue’s Dr. Feelgood shared little in common with Alice in Chains’ Facelift, they both made sense in the context of their respective branches of rock and roll at the dawn of the nineties. Radiohead’s 2000 album, Kid A, is the first release that I can recall from that era that had massive success despite being very formally ambitious. To be clear, experimentation was happening in all types of music throughout the eighties and nineties, but it wasn’t producing big sales or dominating the conversation like Kid A did when it dropped. Of course record labels, like any large corporations, are slow to course correct when the culture shifts. Within months of Kid A, D’Angelo had to fight tooth and nail with Virgin records to release Voodoo, simply because it didn’t conform to the standard of what R&B records were supposed to sound like at the turn of the century. The following year, Wilco found themselves in a similar predicament. The resultant scuffle, and eventual disassociation with their label, Reprise, led to the band releasing their definitive statement on Nonesuch Records in 2002.
From the vantage point of 2023, it’s hard to even fathom why Reprise refused to release the album. At its core, these are the types of melodies and hooks that the band’s fans would be familiar with from 1999’s Summerteeth, or even tracing the act’s roots back to Uncle Tupelo in the early 90’s. In fact, it is probably the strongest, most consistent batch of tunes that Wilco ever laid down on a single album. Glancing back from a year where Lil’ Yachty basically put out a Pink Floyd album, you kind of wonder what all the fuss was about. Yet, 2002 is not 2023, and Wilco is not Radiohead. Part of the reason that Kid A was able to resonate so well, is that Radiohead already had a predilection for unorthodox song structures and swelling dramatic moments in their music, a tendency that you saw growing in every subsequent release. Sure, Kid A took a bigger leap than most of us expected, but we knew that the band was going to push the envelope well before the album came out. Wilco’s reputation at the time, evidenced by their back catalog, was for producing rootsy, writerly, ultimately no-frills Americana music. There were a few hints of experimentation here and there, but you wouldn’t have seen this album coming, and clearly their label didn’t. All of which begs the question: Was the change in direction worth all of the drama it caused? Commercially, yes, as YHF remains Wilco’s best selling record by about double the amount of the next contender. Creatively? Well, you see where I have it ranked.
The truth is, they didn’t really need the avant-garde elements to make a great album. Song for song, stripped to their essence, this is an incredible collection of tunes. Yet those elements add such an uncanny patina to the project, such attention grabbing surrealism, that it would suffer considerably in their absence. Yankee Hotel Foxtrot feels less like a record you decide to spin, and more like a mysterious transmission you accidentally receive. The sonic palette is expansive, with digital bleeps and bloops and eerie white noise sharing space with the sweet melodies and acoustic guitar jangle. For bright pop rock jams like “Kamera” and “Heavy Metal Singer”, the contrast provides fascinating texture. Meanwhile, slower, moodier tracks like “Poor Places” and “Reservations” are lent an extra dose of haunting beauty by the musical variation. Jeff Tweedy even gets in on the act lyrically, kicking the album off with an earnestly sung line that sounds lovely and alliterative, but needs an alien to human translation to decipher: “I am an American aquarium drinker, I (eye?) assassin down the avenue.” His lyrics do make more sense elsewhere, and while it is not accurate to say the songs all link together conceptually, it is a nice progression to start what is ostensibly a relationship song cycle with “I am trying to break your heart” and end it with “I have reservations about so many things, but not about you.” It turns out that all of the discordant guitar stabs, off-kilter piano plunking, glitches and static help to illustrate the messiness of that journey better than eleven straight-forward pop tunes ever could have.
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Phrenology – The Roots
“The history of music according to the Roots”
That’s a quote from a close friend of mine, circa 2002, describing Phrenology. This album was a revelation for us, and the single artifact that I have used the most to proselytize on behalf of the band. I was bartending when the album came out, and between playing it constantly from behind the bar and talking it up to my friends and co-workers, I’d like to think I converted a few non-believers. This was back when I was still expecting The Roots to change hip hop forever. Looking back, they probably achieved more pop culture success than I could have ever imagined by landing a gig on the Tonight Show, but their impact on hip hop culture is much more difficult to discern. To me at the time, though, it seemed obvious that the degrees of freedom a live band provided a hip hop act would prove an unavoidable siren call to at least the most progressive artists in the genre, and Phrenology seemed uniquely designed to demonstrate that freedom. In retrospect, I think it’s obvious that the band’s experimental approach, omnivorous towards other genres, has been widely embraced by hip hop creators in recent years, but it is much less clear how directly Phrenology played a part in that shift in attitudes. While it might not be the album that is most responsible for the impact to the culture, it’s absolutely the album that first exhibited how a hip hop act could incorporate so many disparate musical elements in a way that doesn’t sacrifice its essential essence as a hip hop album.
So, what genres are at play on Phrenology? The band’s well-documented neo-soul ties are on display with smoothed out tracks like “Break You Off” and “Complexity” featuring guest spots from Musiq Soulchild and Jill Scott. That’s largely to be expected from a Roots record, of course, and hardly at odds with the hip hop world at large. The band also performs a rock song, but it is not, ironically, the track titled “We Will Rock You”.* Instead, the cover/collaboration/sequel of Cody Chesnutt’s “The Seed” is a track that is clearly rooted in rock, and Black Thought finds the middle ground between singing and rapping his verses in a way that draws on the swag of both genres. “!!!!!” is a straight-up punk/hardcore song, unadulterated by any hip hop signifiers, and it rolls right into the near-pop sweetness of the Nelly Furtado-assisted “Sacrifice”. That transition, by the way, is just stunning in its sophistication and ability to bridge the two most disparate tracks in the project. Rock music had been co-opted by rap artists before, dating back to the late 80’s, but no one had ever weaved the sounds together in such a sturdy and artful manner as the Roots achieve on this album. The tour of various musical stylings also includes an avant garde free jazz sound collage on “Water” and a hidden track** called “Thirsty!” which is an electronic dance number. Yet, as you would expect by a band fronted by emcee’s emcee, Black Thought, rapping is still of the foremost concern on the project. You have two uncharacteristically ballistic-themed collaborations with Talib Kweli (“Rolling with Heat”, “Rhymes and Ammo”), a thoughtful lamentation of our culture’s over-sexualization at the turn of the century (“Pussy Galore”), and a couple of straight battle raps (“Quills”, “Thought @ Work”), a BT specialty that has been lacking from the group’s most recent output (as conceptually and artistically challenging as it may be.) In its totality, Phrenology is a tour de force of creativity performed with such assured confidence that you might forget that no one had really ever attempted something so audacious with a rap record before. It may not have sparked a revolution, but we won’t ever know how many artists it inspired to push the genre forward into the much more broadly spanning and boundaryless musical style we now enjoy as modern hip hop.
* When I was behind the bar one night, playing this exact song, a friend’s boyfriend who was quite a few years older than us was offering his unsolicited opinion that this type of thing was fine if you liked it, but you couldn’t reasonably define it as music. It is a terrible take no matter what rap artist you insert, but his argument stood no chance in the face of an actual band who played instruments, particularly once the rest of this particular album progressed. Yet, it was not an uncommon stance to come across when I was younger. Could you even imagine someone in 2023 proclaiming that hip hop didn’t count as a valid form of music?
** The idea of a hidden track is now of course a complete anachronism. “Thirsty” is simply track sixteen of the album on Spotify these days. To me, though, I tend to internalize music the way it was presented when I first encountered it, and so that’s how I write about it. It is fascinating when this blog forces me to consider the way that changes in media impact the way that we experience music, though. If I were to come across the album for the first time today, I would wonder why it was sequenced so strangely, ending on this complete outlier of a tune and not the lengthy, contemplative, spoken word “Something In the Way of Things (In Town)” that sounds like its natural conclusion.
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Lord Willin’ – Clipse
I have spent much of my life since adolescence delving into all different types of music. I’m sure it isn’t surprising for someone who has invested the better part of a decade and nearly 250,000 words writing about music online, but I am that insufferable person who answers “I listen to everything” when asked about what type of music they like. Of course, that’s not true though. I listen to a sampling of most major musical categories, but there is not enough time in a human life to devote to anything but scratching the surface of recorded music. Even Robert Christgau and Anthony Fantano can’t make that claim, especially if you expand the scope beyond America and other English-speaking countries. Suffice to say, though, I listen to more than most across more genres than most, but in some ways I have been historically conservative when it comes to challenging my tastes. Particularly with something like hip hop, which I have been a fan of since the third grade and second-hand cassette tapes of Run DMC and the Beastie Boys, I have found myself slow to adopt contemporary artists and sounds. I think it traces back to the late nineties, when hip hop seemed to be at war with itself across a number of different battlegrounds. Regionally, of course, East vs West was a very real thing, and despite having very little reason to invest in that dichotomy, I was unabashedly an East Coast rap guy off of lyrical style and musical aesthetics alone. Beyond that though, and especially into the early 2000’s, there seemed to be a war between substance and gloss, between a focus on bars and a focus on hooks. I touched on this idea in my introduction above, because listening back to the music of this era I feel like I am discovering some lost bounty of hip hop that I had previously partitioned off in my mind as unworthy of my attention. Clipse, despite being from my native Virginia and entirely unaffiliated with the labels or artists that I had legitimate reason to disregard, was definitely on my “pay no mind” list. And, their sound is definitely different, lyrically and aesthetically, than what I was interested in at the time. But I feel like I must have been obscenely bullheaded to ignore the thousand-watt charm of tracks like “Grindin’” or “Cot Damn”.
There is plenty of rap music about selling drugs, but it rarely sounds this much fun. It also rarely sounds this specific. Clipse traffic in a few gangster platitudes, but their songs are much more frequently populated with interesting characters, like Malice’s grandmother who moved weight she smuggled in from the Bahamas and told the kids it was Ajax when they encountered it laying around her house, or enlightening descriptions of how Miami Vice and Looney Toons nudged a young Pusha T down a criminal path later in life. As someone who has only become a fan of Push in the last few years, it is fascinating to go back to his origins as an artist and discover that he has sustained a twenty-year career rapping about the same topic with essentially the same style. That’s not a knock, by the way, it is incredibly impressive to remain relevant and entertaining with such a narrow focus (and It’s Almost Dry was one of my favorite albums of 2022). This was also the coming out party for the Neptunes, and their minimalistic sci-fi beats that were too radically different for me in 2002 still sound fresh and vibrant today. The confluence of such a charismatic emcee duo with a laser-like focus to their rhymes and the soon-to-be hottest beat merchants in the game coming together to display a new style and rep a neglected region of the country led Lord Willin’ to achieve instant classic status for anyone who was paying attention. Thankfully, those of us who were not paying attention always have the opportunity to go back and correct the sins of our past.
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Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots – The Flaming Lips
If I recall correctly, Yoshimi was my introduction to The Flaming Lips. I was certainly not an experimental rock or dream pop enthusiast at the time, and no one in the circles I ran in was familiar enough with the band to regale me with tales of how great they were in concert (a common assertion about their live show, although I’ve never been to one myself). Yet, even in the internet’s Mesolithic era you could start to find reliable information about new music that was not so tightly curated as whatever Rolling Stone editors decided to feed you, and I started to access a broader range of opinions on styles that were outside of my comfort zone.* Coming across a purported rock opera with that particular title and concept, I was a pretty easy mark. I probably bought the cd without even listening to it (or maybe I pirated it, we all have our shady pasts). The album really didn’t turn out to be a rock opera, with the story merely encompassing the first four tracks and the cover art, but I was so entranced by the shimmering electro-psychedelia that I don’t think I actually noticed for months. Basically, having read the title you have already digested the totality of the plot, so I appreciate the fact that the band didn’t constrain themselves by trying to stretch it out across the entire run time. This is particularly true given how strong many of the non-Yoshimi related songs are. Before we get there, though, I’d like to spend a moment appreciating my favorite jam off the album, “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt 2”. It is an instrumental track that aims at depicting the titular action. I don’t know precisely what a battle between a Japanese school girl and several fuchsia, Castle in the Sky style automatons sounds like, but the quirky, funky blast of synthesizer and drumming and wild vocalization by Yoshimi P-We evoke that battle surprisingly well with the benefit of the surrounding context. The back half of the album, though, is where the band really shines by crafting idiosyncratic and fuzzy pop tunes with much more universal appeal than wacky concept album shenanigans. “Are You a Hypnotist??” blends the trippy folksiness of the Grateful Dead with the trippy art rock of Radiohead for a sweet sort of love(?) ballad with cryptic lyrics. “It’s Summertime” recalls XTC’s Skylarking with its instrumentation mimicking crickets and birds chirping and somehow conjuring images of fireflies at dusk in July. Lead single “Do You Realize” sounds like the ruminations of a person who has ingested the amount of drugs you might be expected to take to get the most out of listening to this album. Like “hey man, do you realize we are actually floating through space right now?” But eventually the lyrics stumble on something like profundity, stoned or otherwise:
Do you realize that everyone you know will someday die? And instead of saying all of your goodbyes, let them know you realize that it’s hard to make the good things last. You realize the sun doesn’t go down, it’s just an illusion created by the world spinning round.
That’s a pretty poetic and mature take on perspective and making the most of your limited time on Earth for the album about the big robot fight. All of the tracks I highlighted, and the rest honestly, are as beautiful as they are imperfect and hazy. I never really fully jived with the Flaming Lips after this album, not helped I’m sure by their early 2010’s beef with Erykah Badu which put them on my bad side**, but this is an album that I’m always happy to return to.
* In the nineties, you couldn’t treat anything you read online with any more veracity than what you overheard from some random weirdo at the record store. I recall a website that was exclusively dedicated to the Wu Tang Clan claiming that they only had like six members and one of them was Redman. You could just say whatever back then and there was no horde of fact-checking semantics nerds to shout you down in the non-existent comments section.
** Fine, I’ll save you the Google. Badu had cut a track with the band, and then they went behind her back and paid her sister to star in a video for the song in which she lies naked in a bathtub and gets covered in a number of ambiguous but suggestive viscous liquids. It’s gross on many levels, but especially how they cut Badu out of the creative process to bring in a woman that looks similar to her to do something that she would clearly find degrading to do herself.
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Blazing Arrow – Blackalicious
I frequently cite Black Thought as the world’s most criminally slept on emcee, but the fact of the matter is that take has become a bit of his brand in recent years. Thought is, for sure, wholly excluded from some of the discourse around the topic of greatest of all time, but he is also heavily included in other discourse on the same topic. While I certainly believe that his legendary status should be as consistently acknowledged as many of his 90’s contemporaries, I am far from the only one who recognizes the Philly native as a GOAT contender. You know who’s an emcee that I think is great but I never hear being brought up? You would be able to guess, except you don’t know who raps for Blackalicious, do you? Gift of Gab is not a contender for GOAT, but he is a particularly talented wordsmith with the capacity for lightning speed that should afford him more airtime in the general conversation about lyricists. He is neck and neck with Little Brother’s Phonte in terms of the greatest emcees that time forgot. On Blazing Arrow, the most accomplished work from Blackalicious’ relatively small discography, he flashes everything you would want out of an emcee, except perhaps for toughness. He has flows for days, the ability to rapidly accelerate and decelerate his rhyming on the fly, thoughtful lyrics that stay on topic, and he shoulders the workload as the primary rapper for an hour plus with no skits. His rhyme schemes can be relatively straightforward and conversational, but at times he veers into some complex word salad akin to an Aesop Rock or MF Doom. He is not a guns and drugs rapper, but he covers most any other topic you could think of. On Blazing Arrow, you get the contrast of the apocalyptic “Sky is Falling” with the sweetly nostalgic “Make You Feel That Way”, an ode to procrastination in “Nowhere Fast” and even a tongue-twisting chemistry lesson on “Chemical Calisthenics”. Keeping the album on the rails across all of this disparate subject matter is Gab’s partner, producer Chief Xcel. He wraps everything in a warm blanket of soul hooks and bubbly basslines, providing a cohesive sonic backdrop that is openly inviting. It is a sound that is very specific to the early 2000s, but definitely one of the best versions to come out of this era. The features are eclectic and impressive, with an incongruous guest appearance by Zack de la Rocha, and much more congruous support from Cut Chemist, Questlove, and Gil Scot-Heron. In all, an overlooked triumph that deserves to blaze a little brighter in the hip hop pantheon.
The Last Broadcast – Doves
I’m pretty surprised that The Last Broadcast doesn’t receive more general acclaim. And by “more”, I mean “any at all.” Who knows, maybe in the UK this is a culturally relevant album, and my perspective is naturally not universal, but I have never heard another human being speak of it, either in person or online. Whatever article or review I read a decade ago that led me to listen to it for the first time is the only time I have ever seen it mentioned in print. That’s not, truthfully, completely uncommon for albums that I consider for this blog, but it is for an album that is this seemingly conducive to mass appeal. We aren’t talking about underground experimental hip hop or niche acid jazz or anything like that. This is catchy, commercially-friendly, major chord melodic pop rock that draws heavily on its Britpop pedigree like the Stone Roses, Oasis, and even Coldplay. In all honesty, it’s not even the type of music that is really in my bag. Yet, here it is in my top 10 of 2002, because it is so gorgeous and well-constructed that it has an undeniable appeal. Before I scare anyone off, let me be clear that “undeniably appealing” is not code for “bland” or “safe” or “dumbed-down”. The Last Broadcast is actually quite expansive in its breadth of sonic elements and tempos. It is downright psychedelic at times, and despite some big, arena-ready moments it can be dark and melancholy. It is simply that the less conventional sonic touches add depth and shading to the Doves’ natural proclivity towards traditional pop song structures, soaring melodies, and satisfying hooks. Perhaps the choice of singles impacted the album’s staying power? Look, I like “Pounding” and “Caught by the River” and especially “There Goes the Fear”. I like all of the tracks, actually, but the obvious bangers to me are the dynamic, aggressive, and trippy “N.Y.” and the layered, moody, and also trippy “The Sulphur Man”. Regardless of what commercial and cultural factors led to this becoming a footnote of sorts, it still remains a highly impressive and rewarding listening experience to me. I just wish it would surface in the collective music conversation to remind me to listen to it every once and awhile.
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Electric Circus – Common
Electric Circus is a clear outlier in Common’s discography (at least through the 2000’s, before I stopped closely following his releases.) If you draw a line from 1992’s Can I Borrow a Dollar? through 2007’s Finding Forever, you see a very logical and steady evolution. Starting as a cerebral but tough-minded alternative to gangster rap, he slowly incorporated more soul elements to his sound and expanded his lyrical focus from matters affecting the hip hop community to matters affecting the global community. In a lot of ways, it mirrors the evolution of the “backpack rap” sub-genre, of which he was a preeminent contributor. 2002’s Electric Circus, however, sticks out like a sore thumb. Common has admitted that he wasn’t really feeling hip hop at the time, and hey, fair enough, maybe he was wrestling with the same biases that I was at the time. What he was feeling, it seems, was psychedelic guitar rock. That isn’t to suggest that this is a rock album, per say, he’s still spitting bars over beats, but the backdrop is a phantasmagoric blend of acid rock, electronic music, jazz and (of course) neo-soul. From the nod to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on the album cover, to track titles like “Aquarius”, “Electric Wire Hustle Flower” and “Jimi Was a Rock Star”, Common gives you a hint about where his head is at before you even hear the first note. What follows is a sound that is hard to pin down and fluid from track to track, but heavily layered with musical elements that are somewhat incongruous to a hip hop release. The album reminds me a lot of Outkast’s 2000 record, Stankonia, in that regard, and also a bit of 2001’s Gorillaz. So, while this may not be the first of its kind, it is incredibly fun hearing Common and all of his neo-soul buddies (Jill Scott, Bilal, Cee Lo, Erykah Badu) tackle this acid rock kaleidoscope of influences without coming across as dilettantes. On the hip hop side of things, Common is still applying his unique ear for rhythm and rhyme cadence to his flows. Most emcees use pauses in their flow primarily as a way to accentuate punchlines, but Common deploys them much more creatively, and frequently, creating a halting effect in his verses that make them memorable and unpredictable. That rhyming style is really no different on Electric Circus than it is on his other releases, but it fits the shift in the surrounding music exceedingly well. Common never seems to be in contention for my very favorite music of a given year, but he remains incredibly consistent in making my top ten, even when attempts something that is completely inconsistent with the rest of his output.
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Juslisen – Musiq Soulchild
The neo-soul of the late 90’s and early 00’s was the first branch of R&B that I was able to connect to in real time. I already loved the soul music of the late sixties and early 70’s, but I had only discovered that in retrospect, since I wasn’t yet born when it was originally released. As a child, my musical tastes were too narrow to really give 80’s belters like Whitney Houston or Janet Jackson a fair shake, and the same goes for the Jodeci’s and Bell Biv Devoe’s of my middle and high school years. I have grown to appreciate some of that music with the benefit of hindsight, but it took D’Angelo, Badu and Scott to engage me in the modern soul music scene. That said, I am only familiar with Musiq Soulchild from features, and this marks the first album of his that I’ve spent any time with. It is exclusively interested in relationships, and really takes its time exploring the topic from a myriad of different angles. Yet, Juslisen still manages to avoid common tropes associated with its subject matter. It is sexy, but its not about sex. I typically find music that describes the act of sex the least sexy thing on the planet, so bonus points for avoiding that particular indulgence which was all too common in R&B at the time. It is also a mature album, but with a youthful perspective. Musiq approaches his topics of choice – from the feeling out process of early infatuation, to resisting the urge to cheat once he’s in a committed relationship, to refusing to suffer for the bad behavior of his girl’s past boyfriends – with thoughtfulness and panache. These aren’t cliched takes on crushes or break-ups, they seem to be more like a manifesto on the artist’s views of what makes a relationship work. On the musical side of things, production is handled largely by the Soulquarians, a collective of likeminded musicians, featuring the prolific drummer and DJ Questlove, who handled production duties for some of the era’s most enduring and ground-breaking classics like Voodoo and Badu’s Mama’s Gun. Their trademark sound is warm, seductive and defiantly organic, particularly in the face of more and more electronic influences seeping their way into all different genres at the time. Ultimately, if you aren’t versed in neo-soul then I would probably encourage you to start with one of those aforementioned classics, but you might not actually find a more purely distilled version of the form than Juslisen.
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The Mantle – Agalloch
“Hypnotic” is not a word you could use to describe the metal that I grew up listening to. By design, it was in direct opposition to the concept: Loud, fast, prone to explosions of complex instrumentation that defied passive listening. By 2002, though, bands like Opeth had started to incorporate more melodic and acoustic elements into their repertoire, and Tool had become prone to longer, repetitive, spacey jams. Agalloch combine those approaches with their folk-metal stylings. The Mantle does not sacrifice darkness for its hypnotic beauty, but it resembles very little of what made Megadeth or Pantera popular metal acts in prior decades. It’s a very moody listen, awash in electric guitar fuzz in equal parts to delicate acoustic guitar plucking, and writerly lyrics that combine themes of nature and paganism with good old teenage angst:
When the heart is a grave filled with blood And the soul is a cold and haunted shell of lost hope When the voice of pride has been silenced And dignity’s fires are but cinders . . .their grandeur shall remain untainted
Singer John Haughm was in his mid-20’s when The Mantle was recorded, but I have no doubt that stanza was pulled straight out of his high school creative writing notebook. While the lyrics may be a bit melodramatic, they really aren’t the focus. Haughm deploys indecipherable black metal screeching as well as a variety of cleaner, more distinctive vocals, but they merely become another element in the trance-like spell that Agalloch are weaving. I might indulge myself a dunk on the writing, as par for the course for this type of music as it might be, but the vocal approach is actually quite successful. The eardrum-grating black metal stuff sticks around long enough to sell something sinister in the music, but the varied techniques mean that you never get sick of it. That seems to be a major strength of the entire band, actually – The music is generally folk-inspired and metal-influenced obviously, but also prog rock at turns, even bluesy for certain passages. It is the type of thing that builds and builds and while an individual song might not stick out the way a “Disposable Heroes” or “Halo” does, you find yourself swept up in the psychedelic grandiosity of it all, and before too long you’ve sat through the whole thing without the notion of skipping to your favorite tracks anyway.
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One Beat – Sleater-Kinney
Sleater-Kinney is a good example of a band I might not have ever gotten around to without the demands of this blog. They are not really punk rock, but punk adjacent, which is simply not something I typically gravitate towards, and those vocals can take certainly take some acclimating to. Then there’s the Lilith Fair of it all. Now I have no defense for how chauvinistic this will sound, but as a red-blooded American boy raised on Dockers commercials that were practically soft-core porn and bands like Motley Crue indoctrinating me to the notion that good rock music was by definition aggressively heterosexual and testosterone-based, I fostered a subconscious impulse to dismiss the wave of female-led alternative and rock acts that came out in the immediate aftermath of the cock rock, good times, hair metal era (CRGTHME, tm). I’m tackling the greatest albums of 1995 next for Found or Forgotten, a.k.a. the year of the universally beloved Jagged Little Pill, but I tried listening to it again and it won’t even be making my honorable mentions for that post. Could be my taste, could be my biases… is there even really a difference? Anyway, I still can’t endure a single spin of Lisa Loeb’s “Stay” without having to stifle my petulant fury, and there’s probably no way to fix whatever’s broken inside of me at this point. So Sleater-Kinney would have been easy enough to ignore, even though they were probably never actually at Lilith Fair, I don’t know, but since I am trying to really give everything a fair shake for this blog series I gave their album Dig Me Out a sincere listen way back when I covered 1997. As demanded by the title (maybe?), I indeed dug it. One Beat is now my third exposure to one of their projects, and it kicks serious ass.
As mentioned above, I feel like the vocals will be the primary barrier to entry for most rock fans. It’s not as if the three band members, who all share vocal duties, are necessarily bad or off-key, it’s just that they have idiosyncratic approaches that don’t treat sounding pleasant as their objective function. I’ve gone on record all over this blog series as someone who is usually unable to connect to punk rock, but I actually really appreciate some of what punk brings to the table – aggression; an aversion to fussiness – when it is applied to other types of music that fit into my wheelhouse. One Beat feels punk rock in all the best ways while also showcasing a lot of smart musicianship and tune-craft. The drumming is fast, tight and almost militaristic, pushing the songs forward relentlessly. Back to the singing for a moment, the ladies use their vocal lines to play with harmony and polyrhythms in really interesting ways. What truly sells me on this album, though, is the combination of great riffs and the sneakily brilliant transitions that they use to channel us from one to the next. To execute that balance and flow is no easy task, but to do it without sacrificing any of the attitude and immediacy that is the band’s hallmark is something truly special.
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Honorable Mentions
Rock/Pop: The Coral – The Coral; Scarlet’s Walk – Tori Amos; Thought for Food – The Books; Audioslave – Audioslave; Busted Stuff – Dave Matthews Band; The Headphone Masterpiece – Cody Chesnutt
Metal: Reroute to Remain – In Flames; Remission – Mastodon; Deliverance – Opeth; The Sham Mirrors – Arcturus; Tremulant – The Mars Volta; Oceanic – Isis; Wages of Sin – Archenemy
Hip Hop: In Search Of… – N.E.R.D.; God’s Son – Nas; Under Construction – Missy Elliott; Temporary Forever – Busdriver; Power in Numbers – Jurassic 5; Quality – Talib Kweli; Deadringer – RJD2
Jazz: Focus – Arthur Blythe; Come Away with Me – Norah Jones Country: Blacklisted – Neko Case; American IV: The Man Comes Around – Johnny Cash; Demolition – Ryan Adams
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