The No Ripcord Years: 1999-2000 (NR10)
As part of our tenth birthday celebrations, I asked the current crop of No Ripcord writers to contribute a few words on some of their favourite records of the last ten years. This is not intended to be a definitive look at the last decade; think of it instead as a space for all of us to remember some of the great music of the period and to promote a few unfairly neglected efforts. Perhaps at some point down the line we’ll do a best of decade feature – this is not it.
Please use the comments space to discuss some of the music you remember from 1999 and 2000. Reflections on overlooked gems and undisputed classics are equally welcome.
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1999:
No Ripcord – in those days, basically your humble editor – stumbled blindly into the world of music criticism on 1999, blissfully unaware of the great sounds going on around it/him. For example, I didn’t embrace The Soft Bulletin until the summer of 2000, and both Sigur Rós’ stunning Ágætis byrjun and the Wilco classic Summerteeth took at least another year or two to reach my stereo. This was before the days of digital downloads and online streaming, of course, when finding non-chart music was actually pretty tricky (and relatively costly) for a teenager living in the sticks. A few years later promo CDs (literally millions of them), great websites like Audiogalaxy, and of course an army of talented writers came to my rescue, helping to place No Ripcord in a far better position to comment on the world of independent music.
Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy: I See A Darkness
Although in many ways I feel like I wasn’t really present, 1999 was clearly a great year for music. Ok, so Pavement broke up – a bit of a downer – but aside from that: awesome music. The Magnetic Fields. The Flaming Lips. Wilco. Sigur Rós. Smog. And this. While The Soft Bulletin probably had a bigger impact on me, Will Oldham’s first album as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy is perhaps my favourite 1999 release. It’s certainly the one I listen to the most. Thanks in part to an admirable cover by Johnny Cash, I See a Darkness is perhaps Oldham’s best known (and loved) song, but other highlights like A Minor Place and Death to Everyone still rank as career highlights. (David Coleman)
The Roots: Things Fall Apart
Toward the end of the 90s, Philadelphia hip-hop band, The Roots, were beginning to gain attention. Things Fall Apart is probably their most remarkable album: an exceptionally realized collection of songs that are mesmerizing in their subtle complexity and demonstrative of an alternative to the orthodox DJ/MC partnership. They seemed to almost break through the constraints of hip-hop and further themselves as a general musical presence, notable not only as a rap group, but also as a modern band. The Roots will always have somewhere to go creatively, because they know music. (Sean Caldwell)
Beck: Midnite Vultures
Vultures is parody with a dark underbelly, a skewering of late 90's party culture as only Beck could envision. At once mocking and fun-loving, the album sprints from disco to hip-hop to 80's post-punk in a whirl of sex and rainbow colours, seemingly bent on indulgent self-destruction before the reckoning sets in. It is also one of the last examples of Beck's once-potent vision, a final chapter to Mellow Gold and Odelay in a holy sonic trilogy. Skewering rap moguls, corporate drug addicts, baby mamas, and even Norman Schwarzkopf, tracks like Nicotine & Gravy, Hollywood Freaks, and Get Real Paid demonstrate the modern, inherent absurdities in anything from wartime dating to trashy tabloid antics. Before the onset of Sea Change and his more serious side, Midnite Vultures was proof that Beck could play the dual roles of amusing jester and ominous prophet to the gait of his own beat. (Kevin Liedel)
Pavement: Terror Twilight
The last Pavement album is often the most forgotten. Many would argue that the band simply couldn’t recreate the success of Slanted and Enchanted and Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain, and they would probably be right. Stephen Malkmus is a genius, but even with the great things he produces today, he will never be able to regain that raw, lo-fi, jarringly immediate sound that characterized his band’s early work. That said, I maintain that Terror Twilight is a great album in it’s own right, taking at times a melodic departure from anything the band had previously recorded, bordering on a sound that could even be described as (dare I say it) pretty. I have a playlist in my iTunes set aside for rainy-day headphones listening, and at the top of the play count is Major Leagues, my all-time favourite Pavement song – and it sounds nothing like Pavement. But I like that. (Conor McKay)
The Flaming Lips: The Soft Bulletin
Those who read my list of the best albums of 1999 will notice there’s a bit of a difference here. Call it an objective view versus a subjective view, with this one being the latter. There’s just too much fun in The Soft Bulletin for any other album to compete. (Andy Pareti)
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2000
Radiohead: Kid A
The prospects of a digitized world so clearly fuelling the paranoia with which Radiohead’s OK Computer conveyed, it was interesting to hear something like Kid A, where modernity and electricity pulsed with a human heart, body and soul. It was almost as if Radiohead had to tie a happy ending onto OK Computer, as if to say, “Yes, technology will overtake us, but we can still have feelings.” Kid A represents an evolution of sound without the abandonment of character. (Sean Caldwell)
A nasty little record that, from the opening hypnosis of Everything In Its Right Place, punches you in the face and then sticks in your craw. Post-apocalyptic in a way only Radiohead can accomplish, Kid A is a marked departure from the digital synthesis of OK Computer, but no less nightmarish. Who could forget a vocoderized Yorke on the title track, mourning to the sway of skittering beats and billowing synths? Though it was long-rumoured as a concept album detailing the plight of a "Matrix"-like world, Kid A comes across more as a sermon to paranoia and isolation than any kind of distinct narrative. Idioteque is a dark and harsh reckoning, while Morning Bell is sterile madness. With such piercing nuggets flying at listeners left and right, only the out-of-place Optimistic mellowed Kid A's needling march. (Kevin Liedel)
I actually didn’t really like this album when I first heard it. It certainly would not have made the list had I made it in 2000. But this album has something buried deep inside it that you need to dig out. It takes patience, but the jewel you will find is worth it. (Andy Pareti)
The New Pornographers: Mass Romantic
I made it fairly clear earlier on in our tenth anniversary celebrations that Kid A is not only my favourite record of 2000 but arguably my favourite of the entire decade. However, in the interests of diversity, I thought I’d write about something else close to my heart here. I’m actually not an enormous New Pornographers fan but Mass Romantic is my favourite album of theirs by a country mile. It’s simply an exercise in power-pop perfection. The Neko Case songs are top notch – you simply can’t argue with Mass Romantic and Letter from an Occupant – and even Dan Bejar behaves himself. Though recent records have been enjoyable this remains the closest the New Pornographers have come to greatness. (David Coleman)
The Weakerthans: Left and Leaving
The beauty of the Weakerthans stems from a sense of frailty and modesty that seems incompatible with claims of “greatest”-ness, so this gesture feels strange, though I can think of no alternative, no real “runners up.” Throughout Left and Leaving, John K. Samson gathers faint, fragmentary nuances of humble lives and moulds them into devastating reflections on fallibility, reminiscence, dislocation, and longing, forming a space where the uncanny everyday exchange of loss and hope is made tactile, where the haplessness of what it is to be human and relegated to romance and concrete, to routines and memories, becomes precise and overwhelming. Left and Leaving holds insights and sensations that cannot be conveyed in any language but its own, and in this way the album is poetic in the most fundamental sense of the term. Mustering a vocabulary for describing it and praising it seems daunting, but the album’s ineffable spirit, a friendly ghost that has haunted me since high school, calls for me to do just that, to sing my imperfect offering. (Tom Whalen)
U2: All That You Can’t Leave Behind
Ok, so it’s hard to argue that anything U2 has produced in the 2000s holds a candle to the group’s older material. That said, I really like this record. All That You Can’t Leave Behind is cheeky, sickeningly poppy, and over-produced, but it simply puts a smile on your face to sing along with Beautiful Day and Walk On. I rarely enjoy albums that are so motivational and optimistic, but in the case of this record, I just can’t help but feel happier after listening to it. Maybe it’s just a guilty pleasure of mine, but I think this one needs to be revisited, even if it is a bit too sugary. (Conor McKay)
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12 May, 2009 - 17:23 — No Ripcord Staff