From the moment Kurt Vile’s fingers slid audibly up the neck of his guitar on ‘Baby’s Arms’, ‘Smoke Ring For My Halo’ was an intensely intimate listen, a long, dreamy and compelling diary entry. On their second album, the Minneapolis synth outfit managed to locate that perfect midpoint between Enya, the Cocteau Twins, and Nine Inch Nails that no one else would’ve even thought to look for.
It was startlingly different from anything she’d ever done before. As our favorite boomer rock stars and singer-songwriters push the envelope further into the territory of how close you get to the dying of the light and still make a compelling record, we see some actually acting their age.
As wonderful a wistfully romantic turn for her as that latest Grammy-winning album was, her most defining moment is still the album that brought her to the dance, in which Musgraves could flaunt her mobile-home cred along with her glamour, her tartness with her sweetness, her observational humor with her heartache. 17. © 2020 NME is a member of the media division of BandLab Technologies. But this R&B singer-songwriter should have won top accolades for her amazing debut album, a raw, sometimes profane, yet brilliant collection of songs about a woman frustrated by love and life. But when it comes down to a choice of just one pick, the self-titled album that preceded it is deeply satisfying as a slightly more stripped-down example of her ethos, with a little more allowance given for the lead guitar breaks that suggest she might have taken to Robert Fripp most of all while she was absorbing her Bowie.
Grimes – ‘Visions’ (2012)
2. They may have sacrificed house and techno for guest stars and retro-futurism, but Daft Punk’s fourth album was the one that made them into superstars. Complicating her sound and letting her mask of Olympian perfection slip, she revealed a more nuanced, interesting human character behind the flawless public persona. I teared up the second time I heard it, too. From the instant rush of melody and light on ‘My Number’ to ‘Inhaler’’s dark and primal passion, third album ‘Holy Fire’ captures the two sides of a band that can work the listeners brain as hard as their heart.
Everything that makes Lamar the greatest rapper of his generation is present and accounted for here: his slippery spirituality, his sensitivity to the grayest of margins between good and evil, his nose for hyperlocal yet universally understandable details, his ear for opulent yet unorthodox beats, his appreciation for hip-hop history and his disinterest in retreading that history, his anger, his empathy, his vulgarity, his monastic grace, his sincerity, his humor. But what’s remarkable about Staples is how rarely his skepticism ever sours into cynicism.
But this wasn’t a completely abrupt shift; even some of his earliest records had him wanting to protect women from the wolves at their door, even if his lyrical angle may have been motivated more by jealously romantic self-interest at the time. It’s somehow indicative of Kendrick Lamar’s casual brilliance that he’d drop one of the greatest debut albums in history so seemingly effortlessly, then follow it with what might be the most jazz-heavy hip-hop LP to date, and then distill it all into a seasoned and mature third effort — all without appearing to break a sweat. 18.
Foals most impressive work to date. Maybe, after a decade of wading through countless cooler-than-thou indie bands and first-thought-best-thought songwriting, I just wasn’t sure how to handle that kind of sincerity and intensity – a piercingly direct song about a lost pregnancy by a woman playing a goddamn harp, writing lyrics in perfect Wordsworthian stanzas with archaic diction, blending Appalachian folk melodies with Baroque arrangements, always willing to risk seeming indulgent or pretentious or ridiculous because she knows she has the chops to pull it off. Joe Newman’s voice was androgynous and rich, crooning lyrics that were idiosyncratic.
Maybe it was personal. St Vincent – ‘Strange Mercy’ (2011) Who the hell knows. A progression from their previous two records, ‘After The End’ moved into far more polished territory without losing what made Merchandise so interesting in the first place; Cox’s silky croon, David Vassalotti’s spiky, intricate guitar work. We’re half way through the 2010s so it’s the right time to look back at the last five years and celebrate 50 of the finest albums. Prior mixtape, 2011’s ‘Section 80’, had hinted at glory, but ‘good kid…’ was another beast altogether: lean and uncompromising, with daring dashes into the hip-hop unknown. The band might have started out in hardcore punk bands but ‘After The End’ opened a new chapter. And also, rather than muddle up the list with multiple albums by the same artist, I am going to take the liberty of giving certain artists two albums — truly great artists have hot streaks rather than singles albums (think the Beatles in the ‘60s, David Bowie and Stevie Wonder in the ‘70s, Prince in the ‘80s, Jack White and Kanye West in the ‘00s, etc. 22.
The new dawn of Arctic Monkeys’ ‘AM’ was a sassy snarl in the face of a cynical ‘post-guitar’ age; proof that rock’n’roll was still capable of dragging itself out of the swamp and evolving into wild and exotic new species.
“I swear I don’t love the drama, it loves me,“ Swift swore in another of the terrific albums she made this decade — and whichever way you think the laws of attraction swing in this instance, there can be little doubt that she’s the great pop dramaturgist of her generation. It’s an oddity of this very odd era that the greatest musical innovation has also been in its most popular genres: hip-hop, R&B and pop.
The War On Drugs – ‘Lost In The Dream’ (2014), 13.
5. City’ (2012) 16. Kendrick Lamar, “Good Kid, M.A.A.D. A song that leaps movingly between verses about adolescent gender identity issues and immigrant bias makes a pretty solid mascot for an entire album in which the Seattle native is a proponent for what she calls “debilitating empathy.” Empowering empathy might be the phrase more listeners would pick, but maybe you should just go with her instinct on a record that does, in the end, floor you.
It features major names (Rick Rubin, Daft Punk, Bon Iver), future stars (Hudson Mohawke, Gesaffelstein, Arca), an actual song called ‘I Am A God’ featuring the actual lyric “hurry up with my damn croissant”. And yes, they’re in alphabetical order: Trying to rank them would take another 10 years …. 15. Apparently not. Setting aside where he is today, both musically and otherwise, there’s no question that Kanye West may be the single most influential and important musical artist of the 2000s so far: Without Kanye, there could be no Drake and so many others. Here's hoping we can get that Amy back in the next decade.
"Testimony: Vol 1.
Just when rap was beginning to sag creatively, Kanye provided its biggest boost with this amazing concept album. But Musgraves is really at her best when she’s doing something as subtle as noting the transactional nature of a dying relationship in “It is What It Is.” Is it too much to ask her to be our modern-day Loretta Lynn, Bobbie Gentry and John Prine wrapped up into one?
Arctic Monkeys – ‘Suck It And See’ (2011), 12. ‘An Awesome Wave’ disrupted the motifs of British guitar music.
This is an album which is striving to be important from the outset, that’s bursting with Something To Say – and miraculously finds the words to express it. That she and her collaborating brother Finneas could wrap all these dark elements up in such an inviting bow was one of the major musical accomplishments of the 2010s. But that could be a synopsis for this entire album, which grabs you as much by lyrics as it does by its musicality.
It’s partly that it’s the one where she “picked a lane,” as she put it, zooming away from Nashville to welcome herself to New York and L.A. (or maybe, by Max Martin-ized proxy, Sweden) as an unabashed Top 40 stylist.
The Weeknd himself worked this vein to a logical conclusion and then unveiled the superstar he’d apparently been hiding all along, but it’s rare to hear an R&B artist — and particularly an R&B producer — today who doesn’t owe this album a monumental debt. 2.
You could view all this as precursor to Beyoncé’s even greater triumph with her Coachella show, the singular live event of the decade, a celebration of the African American experience that felt like the greatest halftime show that ever just took over and superseded the game.
; "Elephant," The White Stripes; "Acoustic Soul," India.Arie; "Van Hunt," Van Hunt; "Late Registration," Kanye West; "Who Is Jill Scott? ‘Lonerism’ was Kevin Parker’s faltering internal monologue translated through a pop filter into a giddy, spine-tingling aural hug. "The Marshall Mathers LP," Eminem: This is Eminem's greatest album, where his demented genius is at its apex, with songs such as "Stan" and "The Way I Am."
And still, nothing sounds quite like Shabazz Palaces.
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