Most Influential Albums Of The 2000s: If You’re Feeling Sinister
And another!
Indie pop existed before Belle & Sebastian, and Stuart Murdoch has not been shy about namechecking the likes of Orange Juice, Felt (see “Rain Of Crystal Spires”), The Smiths (see “Cemetry Gates”), and Sarah Records in Belle & Sebastian lyrics, liner notes and blogs. But indie pop as a genre seemed to sharpen, to change, after Belle & Sebastian rose to prominence with 1998’s If You’re Feeling Sinister. My favourite Belle & Sebastian album is Tigermilk, which I love for its innocence and its unashamed pop music. But Belle and Sebastian, in a lot of ways, signified the shyness, thinking, and repressed sexuality of people who read books rather than go clubbing, who reject the mythology of rock and roll, who listen earnestly and seriously. I mean, there’s a book by Kafka on the cover. This was not all Belle & Sebastian had in them, as they later made very clear, but If You’re Feeling Sinister, and songs like “Dylan In The Movies” and “Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying”, is perhaps the purest distillation of this idea of Belle and Sebastian.
Compared to the likes of The Field Mice (see “If You Need Someone”), indie pop after B&S had less jangly shoegazey haze, and more baroque/folk sixties influence. Belle & Sebastian were fairly upfront about their love for Forever Changes era Love (see “A House Is Not A Motel”), (the softer side of) the Velvet Underground (see “Sunday Morning”), and the Left Banke (“Pretty Ballerina”), and on some songs were dead ringers for Donovan (“Jennifer Juniper”) or Simon & Garfunkel (“I Am A Rock”). It became a more explicitly feminine music, and bands became larger collectives (like B&S) than the simple 3-4 pieces common in the 1990s (e.g., Architecture In Helsinki or the Arcade Fire); many bands, like Belle & Sebastian, had female members (Architecture In Helsinki/Camera Obscura). Because of this sixties influence, indie pop post-Belle & Sebastian came across more as a softer cousin to power pop – pop music for people who felt out of time and out of step with modern life.
The most obvious musical progeny of Belle & Sebastian is the similarly Scottish Camera Obscura, who originally sounded a lot like Belle And Sebastian with a girl singer on early albums like Underachievers Please Try Harder (see “Keep It Clean”); Stuart Murdoch even took the photo on the album cover. Camera Obscura eventually found their own sound, becoming more influenced by Spectoresque 1960s girl groups on more recent albums (e.g., 2009’s My Maudlin Career). But even so, like Stuart Murdoch, Tracyanne Campbell of Camera Obscura has unflinching, biting lyrics that contrast with the prettiness of the music (e.g., “French Navy”), and like Stuart Murdoch, Campbell isn’t afraid to namecheck 1980s indie pop types (“Lloyd, I’m Ready To Be Heartbroken”, the perfect example of their aesthetic, an answer song to Lloyd Cole’s “Are You Ready To Be Heartbroken?”).
Jens Lekman’s aesthetic is reminiscent of the Magnetic Fields – his voice sounds a lot more like Stephin Merritt than Stuart Murdoch, and there’s more ukelele in the Magnetic Fields than in B&S – but there are quite a few ways in which his work seems like a logical extension of Belle & Sebastian’s new indie aesthetic. Lekman lives in a similar lyrical world to Belle & Sebastian, and is influenced by the same 1960s aesthetic. But where Belle & Sebastian would allude to 60s baroque pop group Left Banke in a song (“Piazza New York Catcher”), Jens Lekman samples them in “Black Cab”. But Lekman’s music doesn’t sound sampled/electronic; it sounds like indie pop, and listeners who don’t know who the Left Banke are would have no idea that the harpsichord riff that begins the song is a sample.
But Belle & Sebastian were never as twee as the stereotype suggested. They have, after all, spent most of the 2000s making crunchier, more upbeat music than you’d think if you knew them by their supertwee reputation alone, on albums like Dear Catastrophe Waitress (see “I’m A Cuckoo”). In sound, the bouncier Belle and Sebastian numbers sound to me like a template for the more upbeat indie pop aesthetic of bands like the Magic Numbers (“Forever Lost”) or The Shins (“Saint Simon”) seems influenced by the same sixties pop bands that have influenced Belle & Sebastian, and - for that matter - that sixties pop, more or less, interpreted through the B&S aesthetic. Of course, the Shins’ most famous song, “New Slang”, is just as influenced by Love, Simon & Garfunkel, et al, as B&S ever were.
And some bands took this upbeatness to the next logical step, taking indie pop into an ultimately more dance-oriented arena. Influenced by B&S, Architecture In Helsinki started off with the fey vocals, large ensemble, and the baroque elements. But where Architecture In Helsinki originally sounded like kindergarden kids playing indie pop (“The Owls Go!”) on 2003’s Fingers Crossed, they slowly morphed into a more electronic dance-oriented outfit, and more recent songs like “That Beep” are barely recognisable as indie pop.
Belle & Sebastian’s influence extends further than the ghetto of indie pop, of course; they have also influenced some of the most prominent Scottish music of the 2000s. Franz Ferdinand’s Alex Kapranos shares influences with Stuart Murdoch (Orange Juice/Josef K/etc), and a lyrical aesthetic – the androgynous lyrics of “Michael”, for example. He was even a pretend member of Belle & Sebastian in an early photo shoot in the period where Belle & Sebastian enjoyed fucking with the press. Of course, if you don’t listen too closely, their dance-rock is more obviously reminiscent of The Killers, etc. But, under the surface, the influence is there. Similarly, the Fratellis, on the surface, sound like a fairly straightforward rock band, rather than an indie pop band, but listen to “Chelsea Dagger”; if you dialled back the rock, turned down the guitars, and if the singer sung a bit softer, it could pass for B&S; it has the vocal rhythms, melodies and feminine/androgynous storytelling lyrics you’d associate with Stuart Murdoch.
And indie music in general seemed to get softer in the 2000s, and more influenced by classic 60s pop; where the most popular indie in the 1990s seemed most influenced by Pavement and Sonic Youth, the most popular indie in the 2000s was softer and cleaner in tone, and more retro-sounding. Everything that Belle & Sebastian was, in other words.
Most Influential Albums Of The 2000s: The List
(This is meant as an introduction to my little Most Influential Albums project - if you’ve been reading my blog, you already know all this)
Because it’s about the end of the decade, music people and websites are starting to do ‘best of 2000s’ lists. The word ‘best’ is a funny one, and conflates two separate things: 1) the ‘importance’ of an album, how much influence it had on the music world, and the world in general and 2) what your favourites were. So I’ll avoid the word ‘best’. And maybe my favourites will come later. Instead, I am writing about the albums that influenced the new music I listened to in the 2000s.
So here’s my list. If there’s a link, it’s to a detailed blog post about the album and its influence. If there’s not, I’ll write that post soon!
Neutral Milk Hotel - In The Aeroplane Over The Sea (1998, Merge)
Jon Brion - Meaningless (2001, Straight-To-Cut-Out)
The Avalanches - Since I Left You (2000, Modular)
The Hives - Veni Vidi Vicious (2000, Burning Heart)
Bonnie Prince Billy - I See A Darkness(1999, Palace Records)
The Flaming Lips - The Soft Bulletin (1999, Warner Bros. Records)
Radiohead - Kid A (2000, Parlophone Records)
Belle And Sebastian - If You’re Feeling Sinister (1998, Jeepster Records)
Fountains of Wayne - Welcome Interstate Managers(2003, Universal)
Wilco - Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (2003, Nonesuch)
Feist - Let It Die (2004, Interscope)
Note that the criteria is “influenced the 2000s”, not “came out in the 2000s”. Of course, there’s a sense in which I could say that the Velvet Underground and Nico is one of the most influential records of the 2000s, because there’s a sense in which they are, but they also influenced the 70s, 80s, and 90s. These are records that influenced the 2000s, in particular. You might also notice that most of these albums seem to come from 1998-2001 - this is simply because influence takes a few years to percolate, and longer to have the vantage point of a little distance.
Note also that I do not mean that the influenced artists are wholesale copycats. I’m sure that, in some cases, the artists themselves are not aware of the influence. But I’m the music on these albums was a sort of template. Musicians might use that template for their own purposes. But, also, audiences might shoehorn musicians into the template, or see them in comparison to the template.
Most Influential Albums of the 2000s: In The Aeroplane Over The Sea
And so here we have another influential album of the 2000s released in the 1990s; this doesn’t stop it from having influenced the 2000s. Of course, there’s a sense in which I could say that the Velvet Underground and Nico is one of the most influential records of the 2000s, because there’s a sense in which they are, but they also influenced the 70s, 80s, and 90s. These are records that influenced the 2000s, in particular.
Download: Holland, 1945.
I remember first hearing Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea in 2001 or so, introduced to me by someone I’d met on a Radiohead newsgroup. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea sounded different to anything else I’d heard at the time, I couldn’t place it in a lineage. I had no idea they had anything to do with the Olivia Tremor Control, who I loved (and I still think Black Foliage kicks In The Aeroplane Over The Sea’s lo-fi butt). But the thing that was most noticeable about it was its starkness, and Jeff Mangum’s voice, which seemed to sacrifice control and tunefulness for sheer volume and purity of emotion. They were simultaneously simple songs musically and very complex songs emotionally. On songs like “In The Aeroplane Over The Sea” or “Two Headed Boy pt. 1”, his voice seemed to say, “don’t worry about whether you can sing, just be honest, sing loud and your emotions will come through.” It’s a beguiling message, the kind that really does inspire people to create, to sing music that they hope is true (in contrast, Elliott Smith hasn’t had the same amount of influence, because it requires much more musical competence to ape him effectively - he seems to have elicited a lot of love from people who are already musicians though!). And if Mangum didn’t influence them directly, he certainly prepared the audience for bands like Bright Eyes, Okkervil River, The Mountain Goats, the Arcade Fire, and the Decemberists.
Probably the most successful (and one of the earliest) musical progeny of Neutral Milk Hotel was Conor Oberst of Bright Eyes, who amped up the emotional intensity of the style into something that ended up being called ‘emo’ (despite it having very little to do with, say, My Chemical Romance). Bright Eyes had, for a style like this, enormous success - at one stage, in 2004, they had the #1 and #2 best selling singles in the US (“Lua” and “Take It Easy (Love Nothing)”). Oberst eventually lost the fire in songs like “Sunrise, Sunset” and “A Lover I Don’t Have To Love” - for the same reasons Dylan made John Wesley Harding after Blonde On Blonde, I suspect - and began to write better-crafted songs that lacked the wayward spark of his earlier stuff.
Originally the most obvious of Jeff Mangum imitators, Colin Meloy of the Decemberists took the sound into a perpendicular direction to Bright Eyes. Meloy was more a stylist and craftsman than Mangum; where Neutral Milk Hotel’s lyrics and melodies seemed spontaneous and organic, Meloy, from the very start, had a measured, thought-out approach to his music and lyrics. This initially made the Decemberists seem like a poor copy of Neutral Milk Hotel. But as the band grew in confidence, Meloy made a strength of his stylistic endeavours and craftsmanship, increasingly finding his own style. 2003’s “The Tain” was perhaps their turning point; an epic prog-rock opus based on Irish folk legend, it spoke of a clarity and purpose somehow missing from earlier work; but not only that, it unexpectedly worked – who would have thought that Neutral Milk Hotel and prog rock would go together so well? The Decemberists have kept a clarity since, whether performing quietly political pop songs like “16 Military Wives” or prog-folk oddities about killing babies, from the perspective of the killer, like “The Rake’s Song”.
Less obviously influenced by Jeff Mangum is The Arcade Fire (who are quite influential in their own right). While Win Butler’s voice is full of choked emotion, not dissimilar to Conor Oberst, Will Sheff of Okkervil River, or John Darnielle of the Mountain Goats, the music on albums like Funeral (see “Neighbourhood #3 (Power Out)”) or Neon Bible (see “Neon Bible”) is not immediately traceable back to Neutral Milk Hotel. But earlier EP’s and demos tell a different story; Win’s voice is not as well-controlled, the music is not as ornate, and the sound is more identifiably Neutral Milk Hotel-esque; indeed, a 2002 description of the Arcade Fire by Sean of Said The Gramophone mentions the NMH influence, and when the band morphs into something closer than their latter day sound, Sean (at first) seems confused and somewhat betrayed. But the thing about Funeral that ultimately made it successful was its feel of catharsis, and Win Butler had learned catharsis from NMH.
And these are the more obvious ones, the ones that sang and played a bit like Jeff Mangum. In The Aeroplane Over The Sea was apparently the 6th best selling vinyl LP of 2008, which suggests people are still discovering the album and holding it close to their hearts. And musicians love covering NMH live: The Dresden Dolls, Mountain Goats, Wilco, Rilo Kiley, Drive By Truckers, The Wrens, Fleet Foxes, and then a whole podcast worth of other covers here. Perhaps it is its beguiling message - three chords, a wobbly voice and the truth - that causes In The Aeroplane Over The Sea to be an exceptionally powerful meme machine, propagating its genes throughout the music of the 2000s. Or maybe it’s just powerful music.
(Of course, I write all this, and am almost ready to post it, and am searching for NMH covers to add to my list. And then I dscover that someone else has already wrote the blog post on the influence of NMH, and it is much more definitive and thoughtful than this one: “The Untold Influence of Neutral Milk Hotel”. Tom Williams, you bastard.)
Most Influential Albums of the 2000s: Meaningless
And so I return to influential albums; I’m not sure I’d class “Meaningless” amongst my top 10 albums of the decade (though I do love it), and it’s not going to get on many best of the 2000s lists, but it’s definitely incredibly influential.
It wasn’t until I heard Meaningless, Jon Brion’s only proper solo record to date, that I even realised that there was a Jon Brion sound. But, once I realised there was such a sound, it seemed to pop up on almost every successful vaguely left-field singer songwriter album of the 2000s from then on. Meaningless may have even been self-released after being stuck in major label hell, but it was the point where Brion’s production style became clear, and it was enormously influential - the kind of album where most of the people who bought it were either musicians or movie producers. It has great songs - “You Can Still Ruin My Day”, and “I Believe She’s Lying”, for starters - but the album’s strength, is of course its sound, its style. If you wanted to parody the Brion style, it’d have a chamberlain organ doing chromatic runs over piano-based baroque Beatles chords; the music sounds out of focus, old quirky organs that never quite work right, played sympathetically. Toy instruments, with strange effects. It’s a beguiling sound, straightforward and somewhat otherworldly, traditional and novel at the same time. Though, maybe not so novel anymore; if the sound of a song like “Knock Yourself Out” sounds fairly unremarkable to you, it’s because of how influential he’s been.
Brion’s songs and style became more prominent as he began doing soundtrack work on clever, quirky (and successful) movies like I Heart Huckabees and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind, Punch Drunk Love, and Synecdoche, New York, many of which had a theme tune that Brion wrote, performed and produced (e.g., “Here We Go” from Punch Drunk Love, or “Knock Yourself Out” from I Heart Huckabees). You can hear his sound start to come together on his production of Aimee Mann’s Magnolia soundtrack (1998) (see “Save Me”), his work on the first Rufus Wainwright album (1998) (see “April Fools”), and on Fiona Apple’s When The Pawn…, which first hit my radar in early 2000 (see “Paper Bag”).
Brion also collaborated with Elliott Smith on Figure 8 (2000) and the posthumous From A Basement On The Hill (2003) (see “Pretty Ugly Before”), on the Finn Brothers’ “Gentle Hum” (2004), on Rhett Miller’s The Instigator (2002) (see “Our Love”), and Spoon’s “The Underdog” (2007) – and further rose to prominence producing the Kanye West album with “Gold Digger” on it, Late Registration. And, in a way, Brion’s magnum opus is the unreleased original version of Fiona Apple’s Extraordinary Machine (2003), perhaps the purest expression of his ethos (see a live version of the title track performed by Brion and Apple).
Sean Lennon’s excellent Friendly Fire (see “Dead Meat”) – though not produced by Brion – sounds so much like a more-downbeat Jon Brion-produced album that I read the liner notes twice before I believed that it wasn’t Brion producing it (Brion is thanked). You can also hear the Brion aesthetic in the music of people like Richard Swift (“Kisses For The Misses”), Dan Kelly (“Drunk On Election Night”), Josh Pyke (“The Lighthouse Song”) and Bob Evans (“Nowhere Without You”). Also, take “Catch My Disease” by Ben Lee; check, toy piano, check, warm, upbeat feel; conclusion: Jon Brion influence. And if you hear the soundtrack to an ad on television in 2009, and the music has toy instruments, a shuffle rhythm, a warm, upbeat feel, and perhaps a cutesy female voice - if you watch television in Australia at all you will hear ads like this - you’re listening to something influenced by Jon Brion.
Most Influential Albums of the 2000s: Since I Left You
These are the albums that influenced what I listened to in the 2000s. Or at least, that’s how it seems to me now.
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The Avalanches aren’t even remotely the first musicians to have used samples, of course. Sampling records is as old as hip-hop, and the kind of intricate joy-of-sampling sampling on Since I Left You has precursors in records like The Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique (see “Hey Ladies”) and De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising (see “Eye Know”). Sampling, by the 1990s, was routinely used on even alternative rock records – Beck’s Odelay (see “The New Pollution”), My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless (see “Sometimes”), and The Smashing Pumpkins’ 1979. It’s not the first record completely made from samples – see DJ Shadow’s Endtroducing (“Midnight In A Perfect World”; which obviously influenced the Avalanches), and not the first pop record primarily based on samples (even something like the Timelords’ “Doctorin’ The Tardis” qualifies here). But perhaps Since I Left You was the first pop record I heard where the focus was on the sampling, rather than what was being sampled (or using sampling as a background for foregrounded rapping). “Since I Left You”, the song, wasn’t a dance record. It was a pop record. It was better listening to it rather than dancing to it. And it was the sampling on it, and “Frontier Psychiatrist”, that was the headline attraction, the way they had made the manipulation of samples itself into pop music.
So Since I Left You (and especially their semi-official mix album “Gimix”) seems to have precipated the whole mash-ups thing, to have prepared the ground. In any case, it wasn’t long before Freelance Hellraiser’s “A Stroke Of Genius” popped up. Perhaps the archetypal mash-up, “A Stroke of Genius” took the vocal of the teen-pop hit of the day, Christina Aguilera’s “Genie In A Bottle” and mashed it together with the backing track of the Strokes’ “Hard To Explain”, perhaps the most hyped indie release of the time. It really was a stroke of genius, in a way – it worked musically (the songs worked perfectly together) and comedically (its irreverent use of the Strokes punctured some indie myths – they were just pop music). In a lot of ways, Since I Left You and mash-ups like “A Stroke of Genius” were the music of the internet age, in their seeming disregard for copyright, the way they reused old things in new ways, the use of memes, the encyclopaedic knowledge, and the irreverent humour of it. And mashups, years later, can still hit the spot (see DJ Morgoth’s “Never Gonna Give Your Teen Spirit Up”, though be warned about the rickroll).
The oddest thing, though, was the way that the mainstream major label pop music latched onto it; Kylie Minogue took Soulwax’s mash-up of “Can’t Get It Out Of My Head” and New Order’s “Blue Monday” and performed it live. Mash-up artists went very, very mainstream. Danger Mouse’s Grey Album mash-up of Jay Z’s Black Album and the Beatles’ White Album was innovative in its attention to concept, and Danger Mouse went onto be part of Gnarls Barkley, whose massive hit, “Crazy”, is hard to imagine without the Avalanches coming first, and the producer behind “Feel Good Inc” by Gorillaz. And you know something has hit the mainstream when the Beatles get in on the act, mashing up their own songs on 2006’s Love; for example “Within You Without You/Tomorrow Never Knows”. Paul McCartney also put together an album with the Freelance Hellraiser, Twin Freaks (see “Coming Up”).
And it’s not like mash-ups or the Avalanches influence have gone away. The runaway success of Girl Talk is self-explanatory (see “Play Your Part pt. 1” from the 2008 Feed The Animals). The Mirwais remix of Sonny J’s “Can’t Stop Movin’” from 2007 pilfers from “Since I Left You” the song fairly shamelessly. It’s hard to imagine Israeli musician Kutiman’s recent (and fantastic) Thru You project – which took hundreds of samples of You Tube videos and made surprisingly brilliant music out of it - without Since I Left You. And if the Avalanches had released Ruckus Roboticus’ excellent 2007 album Playing With Scratches (see “When I Grow Up”), it would have been seen as a brilliant follow up.
But The Avalanches have seemed incapable of following up Since I Left You; 9 years later, they don’t seem any closer to releasing anything. Since I Left You spent over a year in copyright clearance hell before being released, and as a major label band the Avalanches can’t run with what they unleashed. They can’t keep up with the Girl Talk schtick, they can’t freely sample what they wish, they’re inevitably constrained by major label lawyers insistent on properly following copyright law. But even if it’s the only album they ever released, it’s simply smashing, not only for what it was, but for its sound, which simultaneously sounded like the past and the future, which was fun, summery, listening, simultaneously very simple and very complex. It seemed to express the possibilities of a new medium and a new millennium.
Most Influential Albums of the 2000s: Veni Vidi Vicious
So I am writing about the albums that influenced the new music I listened to in the 2000s. I want to say a little more about what I mean by influence. But I’m arguing that the music on these albums serves as a sort of template.
I remember seeing The Hives’ “Die All Right” on Rage one Friday night in early 2001, and thinking that the music really stood out against the parade of new releases I’d seen. Indie music was generally trying to be very serious, sombre and arty at that point – see Kid A - and alternative rock had long lost any spark it once had. “Die All Right” was just the right thing at that point (and “Hate To Say I Told You So” perhaps even more so); it deliberately denied authenticity and trying to be serious and arty (The Hives claimed their songs were written by a mysterious svengali, Randy Fitzsimmons, they all wore uniforms) while having a raw punk sound that was sharper, more urgent, and snarlier than the punk I’d heard (Offspring, Green Day, etc) had gotten in 2000, the year Veni Vidi Vicious was released. It was fun, uncomplicated music that felt like the right thing at the right time.
The Hives, at least in the world I lived in, seemed to beat The White Stripes to prominence (though only by a few months), and initially seemed more satisfying – they had more raw power, were surer in their purpose, etc. Certainly, the first White Stripes song I heard, “Hotel Yorba”, from 2001’s White Blood Cells, resembled Country Joe and the Fish more closely than The Stooges. However, as it turned out, the Hives had one song done over and over again, whereas the White Stripes (who also denied authenticity and had a similarly stark, urgent sound) were a more versatile band (ironically, given their limitations – guitar and drums, no overdubs, etc), one that melded inspirations from all over the place into a consistent aesthetic on songs like “Dead Leaves And The Dirty Ground” and “The Hardest Button To Button”; this ultimately meant that they had more staying power. But when it comes to influence, the Hives were the big one, initially.
The major labels saw the writing on the wall and quickly promoted the Strokes and the Vines, who initially shared the lo-fi punky garage aesthetic and the ‘The’ with the Hives and White Stripes. Once the Vines’ album Highly Evolved came out in 2002, it became more obvious that songs like “Get Free” and “Factory” were quite different to the garage rock aesthetic (they were basically Nirvana + Oasis), but their earlier demos – which is what sparked interest – have more lo-fi punk in them (see the demo of “Ain’t No Room”). And though the Strokes, on 2001’s Is This It, were more diffident and studied than the Hives on songs like “Last Nite” and “Modern Age”, they ultimately had influences from a similar milieu – Iggy Pop’s “Passenger” and Television’s “See No Evil” rather than The Stooges “I Wanna Be Your Dog” and The Saints “I’m Stranded”.
A storm of bands rapidly followed that (at least initially) seemed to follow the general template. The Black Keys (see “Have Love, Will Travel” from 2003’s Thickfreakness), the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (“Bang”, from the 2001 Machine EP), and the Two Gallants (see 2005’s “Las Cruces Jail” from What The Toll Tells) followed the blues-punk guitar-drums template (at least initially, in the Yeah Yeah Yeahs case). The Libertines (see “I Get Along”, from 2002’s Up The Bracket) and The Exploding Hearts (see “I’m A Pretender”, from 2003’s Guitar Romantic) took the Strokes template. In Australia, The Mess Hall – who had the White Stripes’ guitar+drums blues/punk aesthetic – rapidly got big, being in the right place at the right time (see “Lock And Load” from their Driving Sideways EP), and Rocket Science – who had a similarly frenetic 1960s garage sound on songs like “Burn In Hell” (from 2000’s Welcome Aboard The 3C10), complete with overdriven cheesy organ and snarling vocals – built up a following through an excellent live show and being in the right place at the right time.
Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” (2003, Get Born) was the point where this aesthetic jumped the shark – it seemed like it fit the template, with the rhythms of Iggy Pop’s “Lust For Life”, and a vocal delivery reminiscent of Jack White, but it was the point where the snarl and urgency disappeared, replaced by journeyman craftsmanship. Perhaps the last notable band largely influenced by this aesthetic were Wolfmother; the White Stripes sound was so much a part of the zeitgeist in 2005, when their debut album was released, that Wolfmother’s slavish imitation of them on a song like “Woman” was completely ignored, while every article focused on the Deep Purple and Black Sabbath influences Andrew Stockdale denied.
Most Influential Albums of the 2000s: I See A Darkness
So I am writing about the albums that influenced the new music I listened to in the 2000s. (I See A Darkness, as you might be aware, came out in 1999, but the criteria is “influenced the 2000s”, not “came out in the 2000s”). I want to say a little more about what I mean by influence. I completely and utterly do not mean that the artists in question are wholesale copycats. I’m sure that, in some cases, the artists themselves are not aware of the influence. But I’m arguing that the music on these albums was a sort of template. Musicians might use that template for their own purposes. But, also, audiences might shoehorn musicians into the template, or see them compared to the template.
Bonnie Prince Billy’s I See A Darkness (1999) wasn’t Will Oldham’s first or last album under his bewildering variety of alter egos, but it seemed like the point where he started to have influence. After all, the title track was covered, beautifully, by Johnny Cash. Will Oldham seemed to combine the studied ramshackle apathy of Pavement with the old weird America of the famous Anthology of American Folk Music compilation. But where listening to Pavement was like joining some secret club with a parade of injokes, listening to Will Oldham, on I See A Darkness tracks like “A Minor Place” or “Death To Everyone”, most clearly evokes a comfort with human frailty. Oldham’s comfort with his weird, tremulous voice and his fearless, shameless lyricism - “if I could fuck a mountain, Lord, I would fuck a mountain” - has an odd ability to make you come to terms with your own failings and unhealthy desires.
Most obviously influenced by Oldham was Jason Molina (who even played with Oldham in the Amalgamated Sons Of Rest); Molina’s earlier work (e.g., “Blue Chicago Moon”) as Songs:Ohia took the dark, ramshackle country template (and the bewildering array of alteregos) and made a world full of symbolic archetypal language – moons, wolves, roads - out of it. Molina strayed from the Oldham template, and translated his world into a musical milieu inspired by the darker 1970s singersongwriters (Neil Young, Warren Zevon), but his strongest work in his later era (e.g., the title track of the Pyramid Electric Co album, or “The Dark Don’t Hide It” from What Comes After The Blues) which is typically where he uses his symbolic archetypes to portray his own frailty, still betrays the Oldham influence.
The ‘freakfolk’ movement spearheaded by Devendra Banhart (see “Little Yellow Spider”) also takes influence from Oldham’s ramshackle frailty, taking it to a place that elevated the quirky. It’s hard to imagine modern indie audiences getting interested in a Joanna Newsom or Devendra Banhart – artists with odd voices, a willful individuality and an acceptance of their own frailties - without Will Oldham paving the way.
In a sense, the achievement of Iron & Wine songs on albums like The Creek Drank The Cradle (2002) like “Upwards Over The Mountain” was to take the ability of Oldham to quietly evoke human frailty, and put it in a more reassuring and tuneful context (an Iron and Wine cover of Oldham’s “We All, Us Three, Will Ride” floats around). Iron & Wine’s “Such Great Heights” is probably where many first heard this kind of style, and that kind of Garden State folk seems to have sprouted its own subgenre. You can hear a similar rationale in Augie March’s Sunset Studies (2000; my favourite album of the decade), on songs like “There Is No Such Place” (this might be why Augie March’s Glenn Richards has been known to cover Oldham’s “Ohio Riverboat Song”).
And the influence is also present in alt.country; one of the more recent altcountry bands making their way into critical acclaim are The Felice Brothers, who get a whole lot of Dylan/The Band references based on songs like “Frankie’s Gun” (The Felice Brothers, 2008) for self-consciously trying to inhabit the same old weird America. But you can hear the Will Oldham in them too, in the joy and willfulness in their ramshackle sound, and in the odd, raspy voice of the most prominent Felice lead singer.
Most Influential Albums of the 2000s: The Soft Bulletin
Because it’s about the end of the decade, music people and websites are starting to do best of 2000s lists. The word “best” is a funny one, and conflates two separate things - the ‘importance’ of an album, socially, and what your favourites were. So I’ll avoid ‘best’. Maybe I’ll do my favourites later, and what they mean to me. But here I am writing about the albums that influenced the new music I listened to in the 2000s. (“The Soft Bulletin”, as you might be aware, came out in 1999, but the criteria is “influenced the 2000s”, not “came out in the 2000s”.)
The Soft Bulletin initially seemed like a companion to Deserters Songs (1997) by Mercury Rev; the two bands had shared a long history, band members, and a producer. Like Deserters Songs (see “Holes”), The Soft Bulletin took a basic template – a tremulous, uncertain, Neil Young-like vocal, and uncluttered, elegant pop songwriting – into places it had never been before. The Soft Bulletin was a world of its own, shimmering over-the-top orchestration that somehow suggested dayglo psychedelia enmeshed with distorted artificial-sounding drums and loops reminiscent of DJ Shadow (see “Building Steam With A Grain Of Salt”). Atop this soundscape – enriched with odd reverbs and backwards sounds - sat fantastical science fiction lyrics about scientists (“Race For The Prize”), the sun (“What Is The Light?”), supermen (“Waiting For A Superman”), and bugs, sung matter-of-factly, as if this was perfectly normal subject matter. And by some peculiar logic, all of this not only made sense but ended up being quite influential. To me, the emotional core of the album is in the way that, in writing about scientists and supermen, the Flaming Lips dramatised and stylised what are essentially the big questions of how to live your life - what should I do? how hard should I try to succeed? How much should I rely on help from others?
The album had strong, melodic songwriting hiding behind the crazy sounds, and you can see this in the covers The Soft Bulletin inspired; Ben Folds and Neil Hannon’s duet on “Race For The Prize”, Iron and Wine’s “Waiting For A Superman”, and the Postal Service’s “Suddenly Everything Has Changed”. And after The Soft Bulletin, there suddenly seemed to be a galaxy of musicians who’d read the Soft Bulletin and liked it. Most obvious were Tim DeLaughter’s band the Polyphonic Spree, who took the basic template – Neil Young, songwriting, and blissful psychedelia, and added creepy cult choir on their 2002 debut album (see “Soldier Girl”). Grandaddy came to prominence with The Sophtware Slump in 2001, and Jason Lytle’s voice had the tremulousness and songs like “Hewlett’s Daughter” had the requisite detached blissful psychedelia to appeal to fans of Mercury Rev and the Flaming Lips (though, it does the album a disservice to simply dismiss it as a Flaming Lips clone).
My Morning Jacket’s It Still Moves (2003) and Z (2005) evoke Neil Young more specifically and clearly than The Flaming Lips, in Jim James’s tremulous vocals and the organic feel of its anthemic guitar rock; but there is a blissful haze, a psychedelia, in My Morning Jacket that makes sense in light of The Soft Bulletin (see “One Big Holiday”).
And its sonic influence is not limited to dudes who sing like Neil Young – more recently it’s the sound of the music rather than the vocal that seems to inspire those who lean towards electronicky indie psychedelia. Animal Collective, whose album Merriweather Post Pavilion (2009) seems to be certain to be in many ‘best of’ lists this year, aren’t immediately like anything else, but the lineage to their sound certainly involves The Soft Bulletin (see “My Girls”). Benji Hughes’ “I Went With Some Friends To See The Flaming Lips”, from his excellent double album A Love Extreme (2008), tells the tale of a going to see the Flaming Lips live, and then nursing a friend on a bad trip through the experience. While Hughes’ voice is more like a Beck or E, his occasional trips into blissful psychedelia (e.g., “I Went With Some Friends”) are straight from the Flaming Lips playbook.
Australian band Richard In Your Mind have a darker, more paranoid psychedelia on The Future Prehistoric (2007), with less blissfulness and more creepy, but their combination of 1960s psychedelia tropes with modern FX, drum machines and loops, comes from a similar place to the Flaming Lips, as do the lyrics about science stuff (see “For When The Gizmo’s On The Fritz”). Black Moth Super Rainbow, on albums like Dandelion Gum (2007) and Eating Us (2009), avoid vocals where they can, opting for vocoders when clearly necessary, and they amp up the electronica and the psychedelia by sacrificing songwriting to mood; but nonetheless The Soft Bulletin lurks within (see “Sun Lips”). And finally, you can hear it in Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest (2009); their thing on songs like “Two Weeks” is to meld soaring vocals reminiscent of the Beach Boys or Jeff Buckley to a more offbeat, psychedelic setting, often with drumbeats and sounds reminiscent of the likes of “Race For The Prize”.
Most Influential Albums of the 2000s: Kid A
Because it’s about the end of the decade, music people and websites are starting to do best of 2000s lists. The word “best” is a funny one, and conflates two separate things - the ‘importance’ of an album, socially, and what your favourites were. So I’ll avoid ‘best’. Maybe I’ll do my favourites later, and what they mean to me. But here I am writing about the albums that influenced the new music I listened to in the 2000s.
Obviously, I’m not winning awards for originality in arguing that Kid A was influential, what with Pitchfork saying it was the best of the decade. Kid A was influential because songs like “Idioteque” on Kid A, somehow, turned IDM into pop. It worked because a) Radiohead weren’t merely adding some trendy beats to their music, but were big fans of IDM types such as Boards Of Canada and Aphex Twin and b) that Radiohead merely accentuated aspects of their music that were already there; OK Computer’s sound wasn’t exactly traditional. SAs a result of Kid A, thousands of kids learnt that Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin existed, and heard it filtered through different sonic lenses to previous fans; its influence in this respect can be heard in artists from Postal Service (who came about as a result of Dntel’s “The Dream Of Evan And Chan” collaboration with Ben Gibbard, which is much more strongly IDM-sounding than the Postal Service) to Caribou. On the indie rock side, it’s also hard to imagine My Morning Jacket’s Z or Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot without Kid A (whether or not that Wilco cared much for Radiohead, Kid A certainly shaped its reception).
But perhaps Kid A is more influential for what it is not. And I would argue that Kid A is also directly responsible for the rise of Muse and Coldplay. Maybe they would have risen anyway, but Kid A really did polarise you. Critics were giving it five star reviews, but plenty of fans of The Bends and OK Computer hated it. There wasn’t much in the way of rocking out on Kid A – no squalls of guitars like those on “Just” or big epic rock songs like “Paranoid Android”. And fans who wanted some of that were disappointed. But why worry about that when you have Muse to listen to, who (initially) sounded like a caricature of every late-90s Radiohead rock song, what with Matt Bellamy’s operatic tone and continuous heavy breathing, the shamelessly big guitar riffs and the pretentious prog air? Muse were originally filling a gap in the market; they just expanded this gap in the market enough to fill Wembley Stadium.
And, like the lack of rocking out on Kid A, there wasn’t much in the way of sweet, acoustic-based balladry either. No “No Surprises”, no “High And Dry”, no “Fake Plastic Trees”, and Kid A’s “How To Disappear Completely” was too grand and distant to really appease. Fans who wanted acoustic-based balladry instead heard songs like “The National Anthem”, squalls of discordant jazz mixed with menacing electronics. It is not a coincidence that the release of Kid A was followed fairly quickly by the rise of Coldplay, who inherited some of Radiohead’s older influences (their breakthrough single “Shiver” was fairly transparently modelled on Jeff Buckley’s “Grace”; Buckley was also a major influence on “Fake Plastic Trees”) and their leftist politics. Like Muse, Coldplay took a side of Radiohead that Radiohead didn’t need any more, found a gap in the market and filled stadiums with it. If Coldplay had come along two years earlier they would have been dismissed as lesser copyists (see The Unbelievable Truth, who really did a similar thing a couple of years before Coldplay); if not for Kid A, there would be no gap in the market, and perhaps other bands would be filling those stadiums. And, of course, Coldplay are influential in their own right - their alterations to the basic template were echoed by enough bands that it became the default rock ballad mode.
