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Top five albums of the 2000s

Some believe that music stopped evolving in the late 1960s, following The Beatles' breakup

The Jakarta Post
Sun, December 27, 2009

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Top five albums of the 2000s

S

ome believe that music stopped evolving in the late 1960s, following The Beatles' breakup. Others contend that it died in the early 19th century with the passing of Beethoven. But unless you live under a rock, there has never been a dearth of evidence to prove the late 1960s' aging hipsters and the classical purists wrong.

Every new decade has given birth to a novel musical style that shattered conventional wisdom. The malaise of the late 1970s spawned punk; the Cold War paranoia of the 1980s nurtured new-wave and heavy metal; the early 1990s Reagan-Thatcher era malcontent bred grunge. The authoritarianism that prevailed in early 1980s Indonesia was the fear that launched a thousand pop cengeng (soppy pop songs) tunes that sucked dry any potential for popular resistance.

Although there may not be a single musical style that defines the 2000s, some of the albums released during this decade could stand tall alongside the classics. This list is by no means exhaustive; by picking only five releases, we have excluded a large number of near-classic, groundbreaking and just-plain-stellar albums, including The Libertines' Up the Bracket, The Upstairs' Matraman and Efek Rumah Kaca's eponymous LP.

This list is also a reminder that in the era of Internet downloads, it is too early to write an obituary for the full-length album.

  1. Is This It, The Strokes, RCA, 2001. After Nirvana, there aren't probably too many bands as divisive as the Strokes. Detractors have written them off as nothing more than poseurs, five well-heeled, handsome kids who ripped off Velvet Underground and Guided by Voices and peddled them as rock *n' roll.

    They have a point. Julian Casablancas, son of Elite Model Management founder John Casablancas, could pass for a Hollywood actor, and he's probably one of the very few singers who could easily get away with wearing a blue denim jacket.

    His impressive cheekbones and sartorial savvy could easily eclipse the band's music if not for their no-frills, no-nonsense attitude toward rock *n' roll music. Is This It is the sound of young band at their prime, following no rule but their own. Is This It is a record so taut that even the slight guitar chops from Albert Hammond Jr. sound like the works of a guitar hero.

  2. The Nekrophone Days: Remnants and Traces from the Days Worth Living, Homicide, Subciety Records, 2006. Considering the sorry state of the country's pop/rock scene over the past decade, populated only by wannabe corporate sellouts, it is little wonder that one of the best releases of the past decade came in the form of a hip-hop album from an outfit based in Bandung, West Java, no less. This album may be too smart for its own good, but the intensity with which emcee Herry Sutresna a.k.a. Morgue Vanguard delivers his Marxism-informed lines will grab the attention of even fans of heartthrob Afgan. The album's best moment comes midway through the 15 tracks in "Rima Ababil" (Ababil's Rhyme). Opening with a chilling snippet of a speech by the late human rights activist Munir Said Thalib denouncing the military, this composition launches into an anti-establishment call-to-arms that threatens to steamroll anything in its way. The album was so intense that it drained the creative energy of the band: Homicide disbanded a year after its release.

  3. Veckatimest, Grizzly Bear, Warp, 2009. Late last year, no one knew of the Brooklyn-based band Grizzly Bear. The New York Times and Pitchfork may have named the band's second album Yellow House one of the best of 2006, but beyond a cult following, no one really cared for their blend of folk and atmospheric techno. I, for one, skipped the band's performance at the 2008 Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago. Grizzly Bear took everyone by surprise when their third LP, Veckatimest, shot to number eight on the US Billboard Charts, selling 33,000 copies in its first week of release. The Billboard crowd got it right this time. Veckatimest is a pure pop gem, the sound of what it would be like if Bryan Wilson of the Beach Boys was locked up in a high-end studio for months. Some of the better tracks on the album, such as "Ready, Able" and "Foreground", soar with chamber pop grandeur - a sublime mix of children's choir, slow-burning guitars and ambient piano - that has long been absent from the mainstream.

  4. Gulag Orkestar, Beirut, Badabing Records, 2006. Many of the indie acts making it big in the first decade of the new millennium have mined their influences from the unlikeliest places. Vampire Weekend borrowed heavily from South African sound, Gogol Bordello was indebted to Ukrainian gypsy music, and DeVotchka shamelessly ripped off the Mexican brass tradition. Zach Condon, a.k.a. Beirut, went even further by digging deep into the musical tradition of the medieval Balkans and other Central European regions, a sure-shot candidate for career suicide. But the 19-year-old New Mexico native has pop sensibilities that help turn a one-note squeezebox solo into a highly listenable chamber music piece without sounding exotic. This is the sound of 21st-century youth being nostalgic about early 20th-century nostalgia.

  5. The Osaka Journal, Sajama Cut, Universal Music Indonesia, 2005. Some bands are born so good that they don't need to take up influences from what goes on around them. They just burst onto the scene out of a vacuum. The Stooges introduced punk when the world was immersed in acid rock, while Television played cerebral rock when punk's minimalism had reached a zero-crescendo in the mid-1970s. Local band Sajama Cut came out of such a vacuum. While most of their contemporaries warbled on about romance and heartbreak, the band's second album, The Osaka Journal, brims with wit, regret and honesty about nothing in particular. And it takes a lot of guts to write an album with mostly English lyrics for the Indonesian market. Marcel Thee's songwriting is as cryptic as R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe circa Murmur, and what anchors the album is the happy-sad melodies that don't wear thin after repeated spins. The album's lead single, "Fallen Japanese" has candy-coated Beatles melodies and quasi-choral works that seal its status as an instant classic.

- M. Taufiqurrahman

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