Albums of the decade: from the hat

Allow a few of our writers to give you their albums of the decade...

Idlewild’s 100 Broken Windows – by Paul Brown
As tricky a question as it is, I’d say the album which has meant the most to me this decade is 100 Broken Windows by Idlewild. The album was one of my first forays away from the Oasis, Travis, Stereophonics triumvirate which clogged the early-noughties hit parade, and opened up a gateway away from chart indie.

My love for this record isn’t just fuelled by nostalgia though. Even nine years later, no other British Indie band has matched it for energy, impact and sheer listenability.

It’s easy to understand why this is regarded by so many as a seminal album. . Roddy’s lyrics might straddle the line between intelligence and nonsense, (“…and Gertrude Stein said that’s enough!”) but that doesn’t matter at all, because 100 Broken Windows is powered along by incendiary (and bloody catchy) guitar riffs, and resonates with a glorious and barely contained rage.

100 Broken Windows marked Idlewild’s first steps from raggy-arsed punk slashers into something a little more refined. They might eventually have gone too far down the road to maturity, but at this stage Idlewild were still one of the most exciting bands in the world.

Natalie Shaw:
Instead of re-reviewing my albums of the decade, I’ve done a list of my favourites (in no particular order) -

Life Without Buildings’ Any Other City
Maxïmo Park’s A Certain Trigger
Cat Power’s The Greatest
Wild Beasts’ Two Dancers
Frightened Rabbit’s The Midnight Organ Fight
Voxtrot’s Mothers, Sisters, Daughters & Wives (yeah it’s an EP, whatever)
Shearwater’s Rook
LCD Soundsystem’s Sound Of Silver
Sun Kil Moon’s Ghosts Of The Great Highway
The National’s Boxer
Radiohead’s In Rainbows
Blur’s Think Tank
Of Montreal’s Hissing Fauna, Are You The Destroyer?
Field Music’s Tones Of Town
Art Brut’s Bang Bang Rock & Roll
Joan As Police Woman’s Real Life
Electrelane’s The Power Out
Mirah’s Advisory Committee
Tom Vek’s Nothing But Green Lights
Ted Leo & The Pharmacists’ Hearts Of Oak
Pete and The Pirates’ Little Death
The Blow’s Paper Television
Baby Teeth’s The Baby Teeth Album
Aloha’s Some Echoes
El Perro del Mar’s El Perro del Mar

Manic Street Preachers’ Journal For Plague Lovers – by David Lichfield
Seemingly incapable of providing the world with incendiary material again, the Manics served up a combustible slice of humble pie with Journal For Plague Lovers. From the ominous In Utero-isms of ‘Peeled Apples’ to the raucous hidden track ‘Bag Lady’, the use of Richey Edwards’ lyrics brought a sense of massve urgency to affairs sadly lacking over the previous decade. Combining gallows humour with the best aspects of their populist output and the uncompromising blaze of their earlier work, this album hung together like a gripping scenes from a quintessential movie, each track peeling off horrific layers of Edwards’ doom-fated mindset. Hugely eclectic and massively cryptic, spine-chilling tracks such as ‘Me and Stephen Hawking’ and ‘Marlon JD’ were powered with the sonic relevance of a youthful, vicious band at the peak of their powers, whilst ‘Facing Page: Top Left’ and ‘William’s Last Words’ were shot through with a stomach-churning foreshadow.

Broken Social Scene’s You Forgot It In People by Daniel Harrison:
In a decade when so much great music emerged from Canada, this 2002 album from the sprawling Toronto-based collective was the point where all that untrammelled creativity reached its glorious peak. Rousing, swelling, superb indie anthems like ‘KC Accidental’, ‘Stars and Sons’ and ‘Cause = Time’ are hook-laden and danceable, the tunes never smothered by the arsenal of instruments thrown into the mix. It was a sound that cleared the way for Arcade Fire and influenced much of what was to follow, but it’s the more subdued moments that really seal YFIIP’s classic status. ‘I’m Still Your Fag’ is desolate, hypnotic minimalism; the majestic ‘Shampoo Suicide’’s  trance-inducing ambience gives way to a haunting, multi-layered climax; while on ‘Anthems for a Seventeen-Year Old Girl’, a sublime banjo-and-strings backdrop frames a gorgeously-sung (by Metric’s Emily Haines) lament for lost youth: ”Park that car / Drop that phone / Sleep on the floor / Dream about me…”. There’s also time for detours into garage squall (’Almost Crimes’), hazy, dreamy pop (’Looks Just Like The Sun’) and a sun-kissed instrumental jam (’Pacific Theme’), yet at no point does the album lose its irresistible flow. Eclectic, adventurous and exhilarating, it’s a record to lose yourself in.

The National’s Boxer, by Stef Siepel:
For their second album they went in debt to make it. The third got them the recognition, their fourth did not only get them out of debt, it would be The National’s magnum opus (up to this point). The arrangements, the lyrics, the themes running through the songs: it is rare that an album both can document the zeitgeist so well whilst also having all the qualities of being timeless, which is the case with Boxer. The songs are build up and structured beautifully, between those insistent drums, the guitars, and occasional guest appearances by horns and the like. And then there is that feeling of confusion yet beauty, the mixture of loss yet comfort. Lines like: “And we put our arms around the stereo for hours/as it sings to itself, or whatever it does/as it sings to itself of its long lost loves” are yet to be rivaled in this decade, putting Berninger firmly among the worlds best lyricists. The combination of orchestration and lyrical depth makes this my favourite album this decade.

Aereogramme’s Sleep and Release – by Peter Harris
The beardy Scots were masters of juggling big brooding, jagged rock with the most delicate and heartfelt melody and over their three albums and three EPs they never mixed the ingredients to better effect than on 2003’s Sleep and Release.

The album has everything a growing boy needs in his rock diet – ‘Indiscretion#243′ opens with a bass lines that sounds like someone carving concrete and ends with an organ led sing-along. ‘Black Path’ is airy and almost hymn like. ‘Older’ riffs and crunches along and melds into the absolutely spectacular ‘No Really, Everything’s Fine’ which would certainly be in the running for my song of the decade. Then we have ‘Yes’, a pop song with a riffing bridge that to this day still causes my neck hairs to quiver. The album ends on the lush trio of ‘In Gratitude’, ‘A Winter’s Discord’ and an unnamed final track which rolls strikingly into a string soaked denouement.

The band didn’t quite have the support they deserved when they were still going and I for one miss Aereogramme more than any other band who has split in this last decade.

Godspeed You Black Emperor!’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven – by Rory Gibb
When I was about 15, there was a boy at school who used to listen to Godspeed You Black Emperor!. I once asked him what he was listening to; we’d just traded copies of Tool albums and I wanted to try and find some new music along the same lines. I was immediately put off by his response – the name conjured up images of some terrifying black metal band, which teenage me really couldn’t be dealing with – and resolved never to bother. More fool me. It wasn’t for another five years or so that I actually listened to them, and with retrospect if there was one band I would dearly love to have seen live, Godspeed would take the prize.

2000’s Lift Your Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven wove together all the threads of their previous work, both artistically and politically, to startling effect that hasn’t diminished one iota in the near-decade since its release. And in a world where lawful protest is increasingly crushed under the weight of city surveillance, the proud march of the corporate state continues unabated and we still send soldiers to die in the desert under unjust pretences, its message now seems more relevant than ever. Still, even beyond its conceptual strength it is simply a beautiful album, and probably the finest ‘post-rock’ record ever made. Sure, in their time Godspeed had moments of greatness that reach far beyond even the most captivating segments of Lift Your Skinny Fists… , but as an entire statement of intent its breadth and scope of ambition is unrivalled. Even the album’s title is a clue as to its content, a promise of hope even in dark times – if their earlier work was a cry of rage, an admission of ‘Everything’s fucked, but we can’t do anything about it’, on Lift Your Skinny Fists they offer a glimmer of redemption, almost intangible but audible in the parade that gathers momentum and recedes into the darkness of ‘Storm’.

The past decade pretty much constitutes my entire musical life, and all the questionable teenage obsessions (the entire genre of nu-metal, anyone?) that went with it. In the end I’ve plumped for Lift Your Skinny Fists… , for the simple reason that, unlike so many others, in the five or so years since it first wormed its way into my consciousness it has stubbornly refused to leave.