Best Albums of 2000: Critics’ Picks

The Anniversary
Designing a Nervous Breakdown (Vagrant/Heroes and Villains)
Everything comes together on The Anniversary’s debut full-length. Set against a mix of new-wave Moog melodies, heavy power chords, and a forceful rhythm section, Joshua Berwanger, Justin Roelofs, and Adrienne Verhoeven’s vocals are consistently dramatic and appealing. Some might call it emo, but Designing a Nervous Breakdown is actually the rockingest pop record of the year.

John Vanderslice
Mass Suicide Occult Figurines (Barsuk)
Upon its leak to the Microsoft powers that be, this disc’s song “Bill Gates Must Die” caused controversy before it was even released. Not only was John Vanderslice supposedly faxed a threatening letter, but he also allegedly started getting phone calls of the creepy kind from Microsoft’s area code. This all turned out to be a publicity stunt, but the entire album is as clever as that hoax, full of off-kilter hooks inside songs that range from murky to pristine.

Frisbie
The Subversive Sounds of Love (Hear Diagonally)
Perhaps the anti-Radiohead, Frisbie has produced a debut of pure, straightforward pop music. As such, most of the numbers are about girls, perfect subject matter for the band’s melodic guitars, organ, and occasional trumpet. These ditties, beautiful in their deceptive simplicity, reveal their charms immediately while managing to get better and better with every listen. Forthright and sincere, The Subversive Sounds of Love isn’t for the hip and trendy, and it’s their loss.

Boot Hill
Laudenum (Self-released)
Laudenum is an Old West kamikaze of opium and alcohol, and this namesake record offers an equally bad trip. Boot Hill concocts a dastardly potion, combining country, punk, rockabilly, and psychedelia in the Midwest’s scariest brew. Guitarist/vocalist Gary Cloud, who’s married to bassist/vocalist Allegra Cloud, uses enough snarl to suggest he’s a hell of a drinking buddy — just stay off his bad side.

Eels
Daisies of the Galaxy (Dreamworks)
As he wrote Eels’ 1998 record, Electro-Shock Blues, bandleader e had plenty of reasons to feel sour, suffering through the deaths of several family members and close friends. Now his mood has improved slightly; fittingly, Daisies of the Galaxy is brighter and sometimes even downright sunny. E’s lyrics still have his trademark biting sarcasm and ironic pessimism, but with the cheery music acting as a decoy, the words don’t start to sting until the songs have been repeated multiple times.

Björk
Selmasongs (Elektra)
In Dancer in the Dark, Björk plays Selma, a near-blind mother trying to save enough money to prevent the same fate from befalling her son. To fully appreciate Selmasongs, the movie’s soundtrack, one must see the film beforehand. Only then can one understand some of the year’s most emotionally affecting songs, such as “I’ve Seen It All,” a heartbreaking duet with Radiohead’s Thom Yorke.

Broadcast
The Noise Made By People (Tommy Boy/Warp)
In the ’60s, a top-secret project to launch Burt Bacharach and Henry Mancini into space went horribly awry, stranding them in a kitschy alternate dimension where the future as then prophesied had come to fruition. Until their rescue, they passed the time writing and recording songs for girl groups and spy movies in that retro-futuristic style, released in our reality as The Noise Made By People.

Jurassic 5
Quality Control (Interscope)
Jurassic in that this collective is old-school, Five because there’s, er, six of them, Jurassic 5 dropped Quality Control during the summer, the perfect time for one of the year’s hottest. The group’s lyricists are as skilled as the legends who inspired them, and the DJs always give them funky jams over which to prove it.

Amon Tobin
Supermodified (Ninja Tune)
Amon Tobin’s goal might be to move the feet, but the arrangements on Supermodified are intricate enough that he moves the head as well, setting him apart from producers who solely desire to do the former. After constructing jazzy grooves, Tobin unmercifully shifts into high gear with thick walls of drum ‘n’ bass and big beat.

The Twilight Singers
Twilight (Columbia)
The Afghan Whigs make soundtracks for sleazy get-togethers where frontman Greg Dulli wanders around pulling his soulful-drunk routine on unsuspecting ladies before inevitably getting into a fight. The first record from The Twilight Singers, Dulli’s side project, captures the feeling of the morning after such a shindig. Initially hazy, the record starts to come into focus song by song, lacking the Whigs’ overt aggression but retaining its R&B influence.

Guilty Pleasure Pop Record of the Year

Various Artists
Now That’s What I Call Music, Volume Five (Sony/Columbia)
Man, this was a sorry year for mainstream pop music, the kind that is so embarrassingly good that it overrides critical impulses. However, a few singles with second homes on this compilation pulled it off: Britney Spears’ “Lucky,” a teen-beat sequel to Poison’s “Fallen Angel”; the relatively subtle “Faded” by soulDecision; and Janet Jackson’s “Doesn’t Really Matter,” which doesn’t even require justification. Of course, ‘N Sync’s “It’s Gonna Be Me” and 98 Degrees’ dig-us-we-could-be-Latin “Give Me Just One Night (Una Noche)” are on here too, symbolizing that this year, the good had to be taken with the bad.