26 GREATEST ALBUMS OF THE NOUGHTIES

What? The noughties? What? But... what? Top albums of the decade? If you insist.

You know now you come to mention it the noughties were a pretty important decade. The human race became more powerful than ever - thereby solidifying its position as the greatest of all races currently available. If you compare the progress we as a species made compared to the progress made by the rabbits or the catfish say, we - the human race - clearly emerged from the last 10 years as the world's number one species. The only competition came from the totemic dragon-fish-god which was dredged up by Japanese fishermen in 2007. As it happened the dragon-fish-god suffocated after three minutes of exposure to our atmosphere. We on the other hand created iPods, comprehensive and convenient archives of online pornography, a new type of hand dryer, an energy drink called Relentless and the film career of Shia La Beouf.

With that in mind it seems inevitable that we at the The Great Atomic Power would turn our attention to musical endeavor. A lot of music has been created in the last 10 years. I don't think many people would argue with the fact that all of it - from Bob Sapp's Sapp Time to Grand Belial Key's Judeobeast Assassination was uniformly excellent. However, it falls to us to sort the wheat from the chaff. When all's said and done what albums have we - the human race - now got to hold up to Japanese dragon-fish-gods and say: "Look! We are better than you! Where are your albums?"

The albums which we must now present to the terrifying aqua-deities are below. But first a disclaimer. This top 26 list does not claim to reflect which albums have made the biggest impact on music in the last 10 years. It does not purport to give credence to the artists who have affected the 'scene' or altered the zeitgeist. Instead it is simply an honest reflection of which albums - whole albums - we at TGAP have listened to and enjoyed the most in the last 10 years. Fashion be damned, here is our list:

26. THORNS THORNS (2001)
The point at which black metal looked down at its pasty, musky frame and sneered at itself in disgust. Thorns was much more than just an album made by a creepy man who had been in prison for 10 years. It was a weird, leap forward into a flickering, shrieking unknown. Gone were the preoccupations with castles and forests - replaced instead by an unfriendly post-millennial anguish and a bit where all the music stops and someone says "Back to my eternal starfield domain."

25. DEVENDRA BANHART CRIPPLE CROW (2005)
Listening to this album now makes me sad – it’s the point that Banhart took his first steps into stadium rock irrelevance, following three beautiful lo-fi albums. But this album is perfectly poised in between, and the end result is like a deliciously assorted bag of sweets. There’s the barely recorded folk that made Devendra the leading light of the New Weird America movements (Hey Mama Wolf), there’s barely reconstructed 70s rock (Long Haired Child), and smatterings of Spanish language tracks (Luna de Margarita). The album holds up to its length (22 tracks) through the sheer strength and variety of its material. Plus it’s got the best album cover of any record here. Guaranteed.

24. BAND OF HORSES CEASE TO BEGIN (2007)
This is a tough one to justify. It's basically a guy with a high, whiny voice singing over Southern-fried, folky alt-rock. Nothing too amazing. But if I left it off this list I would be a fundamentally dishonest person as I listen to it regularly still. It runs out of ideas in the second half, but albums with two complete sides are for slackers. Twenty-five minutes into an album I'm usually called upon to finalise a deal or referee an Afghan horse fight. Bottom line is that this album's lovely and it's the only album on here with a heartbreaking song about a regional newspaper.

23. ELECTRIC WIZARD DOPETHRONE (2000)
In the late nineties, doom was still not considered a proper genre of metal. If anything, it was the freaky elder brother of the (now pleasingly defunct) stoner genre. In the late noughties, doom was common currency among metal fans and beyond. This album is the reason. Adding a dollop of sludge to modernise the sound but otherwise keeping close to a classic doom template throughout, Electric Wizard managed to bludgeon their way into metal’s mass consciousness with juddering doom classics like Vinum Sabbathi and I, The Witchfinder.

22. VITAL REMAINS DECHRISTIANIZE (2003)
Raaaaargh! Death metal! Raaaargh! This album was sent by Satan to sodomise you. Glenn Benton - who on the first track declares himself to be an "unstoppable force of demonic supremacy" - claims that making this album made him realise how hum-drum his day job in Deicide had become. That's how good this album is. It made a man with an inverted crucifix actually burned into his forehead realise his life was boring. It's probably the most blasphemous record I own too. Which is saying something.

21. CANNIBAL OX THE COLD VEIN (2001)
El-P did something special with the production on this one – the organ-heavy beats manage to sound simultaneously claustrophobically urban and yet open and psychedelic. The tracks are matched to the two ideal MCs, Vast Aire and Vordul Megallah, providing skittery raps filled with abstract met-a-phors and non sequitors. Somehow, the album manages to never retreat into a backpack cul-de-sac, instead the whole thing stays healthily on Wu-Tang Battle-Rap Boulevard. My only complaint is that it’s a little over-long.

20. THE SHINS WINCING THE NIGHT AWAY (2007)
The Shins might have broken up by the time you've read this so Wincing would go down as their final record and that's fine by me. Compared to the preceeding two albums this one is far more varied, a lot more interesting musically and just way more fun. James Mercer finally got the hang of tying a complicated (and bitter sounding) vocal melody around a shuffly, sweet accompaniment and the result is an album of deceptively difficult pop songs. How can an album about "crippling insomnia" be so life-affirming? I dunno but Phantom Limb and Australia are clearly two works of mind-bending pocket-sized genius.

19. V/A MOLAM: THAI COUNTRY GROOVE FROM ISAN (2004)
Sublime Frequencies releases are always a joy, and this is my favourite of a great bunch. Thai Country Groove is a compilation of Mow Lam from the 70s and 80s, full of warp-speed cat-person vocals, enormous bamboo mouth organs and psychotic-sounding comedy skits. For the uninitiated, Mow Lam and its cousins is a style of Lao/Thai folk music that no self-respecting Thai urbanite would ever listen to. Prostitutes flee to Bangkok purely to avoid this kind of music. The bizarre-punk craziness on this disc is a billion miles away from the usual tasteful contents of world music compilations. The whole thing sounds like the lost disc of Nuggets.

18. ISIS OCEANIC (2002)
An enormous record that fully lives up to its moniker, Oceanic met with universal acclaim upon its release, although now no one seems to really ever talk about it. That's their loss. Using Neurosis' Through Silver in Blood as a kick-off point, Isis managed to render a charismatic blend of dark-age fury and modern angst upon their mighty canvas. 'Dense' does not adequately describe these song. Pinned down by tight, sparse drumming and recurring bass loops that wouldn't sound out of place on a Cure record, Oceanic's crushing ebb and flow would be much imitated but never bettered in the ensuing decade.

17. WHITE STRIPES WHITE BLOOD CELLS (2001)
The White Stripes’ first two albums were rootsy and under-produced. Their later albums were studio workouts. Their third album was the one where they achieved perfect balance, somehow managing to create a new primitivist stadium rock. It’s a great album, full of great songs. Admittedly, the whole thing does sound a little too close to classic Creedence, but that’s not a bad thing, right? Just like CCR, this is great American music that sets out very knowingly to position itself as part of everything that has gone before. I’m ashamed to say that when this album came out I hated it implicitly. I don’t think I’d even heard it. I’m going to blame hype and then just wash my hands of my younger self in disgust. Shithead.

16. TV ON THE RADIO RETURN TO COOKIE MOUNTAIN (2006)
I love cookies (biscuits) so it stands to reason that I... I'm going to abort that "idea for an hilarious intro" there if you don't mind. This album has two things going for it. Firstly it has actual real songs, that you can touch and smell and stuff. If every band that tried to be this clever also wrote songs as dynamic and memorable as this then I wouldn't become flush with choler every time I buy an album on Pitchfork's recommendation. Secondly, RTCM has the most superfluous David Bowie cameo of all time. A great album - and one which could be accurately described as the first valuable contribution to rock music made by black people.

15. PANDA BEAR PERSON PITCH (2007)
This was a bit of a revelation to me when I first heard it. It was less the beautiful Beach Boys style vocal melodies than the very un-Beach Boys harmonies which made this album such an eye opener. Person Pitch’s secret is the sense of enormous architectural space which it is able to convey through these harmonies. It’s only on later listens that you can even start to pick out the child-like percussion and strange samples that pound out the rhythm behind the vocals. There have been quite a few albums since that have given me the same sense of space, not least Animal Collective’s last two albums, but this is the one that hit me harder and stronger.
JGZM ADDS: Fuck you and Devendra Banhart. This has the best cover of all the albums here.

14. WEEN QUEBEC (2003)
The sad thing about Quebec (2003) is that theme which binds the album together is the fading friendship of the two guys that wrote it - Dean and Gene Ween. If you like Ween as much as me you'll know that's a very sad thing. In any case Quebec is a kick-ass, prog-rock, psychedelic joyride that takes in everything from Motorhead-style face-in-the-exhaust (It's Gonna Be A Long Night) to weird low-fi paranoia (So Many People In The Neighbourhood). Naming all the great tracks on it would take forever so just trust me when I say that most bands would plot an entire career around the amazing songs crammed on here. Viva Ween.

13. JUSTICE † (2007)
This album was definitely the high-point of electro for me. What set it apart from all the other electro-poseurs was the sense of cheesy fun and the ability to find the common song writing ground shared by classic heavy metal and disco and then to repackage it in a tasty dance coating. This was another one of those albums that came out in the second half of the noughties and managed to appeal to everyone, regardless of what genre they thought they preferred they liked. An album so good that it even managed to make Uffie’s tiresome hipster rap sound part of the fun.

12. ABORYM FIRE WALK WITH US (2000)
Who knows how they accomplished this. Using nothing more than a drum machine and some buzzy guitars a tiny cabal of Italians somehow conjured up a future nightmare consisting of hundred-mile high columns of blue flame and raging torrents of electrified blood. It didn't hurt that they drafted in the elusive magikal monument that is Attila Csihar to provide vocals. His rasping, shrieking, diabolic croak sits atop the frenzied guitars and dystopian synths like a perfectly-made hat on a lovely snowman.

11. CONVERGE JANE DOE (2001)
Metal and punk both underachieved in the noughties, starting with the lame farts of nu-metal and pop-punk and squelching to a runny finish with the mulch of metalcore. Converge’s Jane Doe was one husk of golden corn in the midst of all the shit. Not so much an album of good songs as an album explaining to you exactly how thrilling it can be to have a grown man scream at you for twelve tracks straight. It basically summed up everything special about metal and punk in the nineties into one tight, screamy mathematical package.

10. V/A OH BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? OST (2000)
I realise that to bluegrass, blues and roots purists this probably represents some kind of sacrilege, but this soundtrack introduced a massive number of people to styles of music they would never have come across ordinarily. Despite the fact that nearly all the tracks on the album are contemporary recordings, a tangible sense of affection lingers over it. I know for a fact there are people in Beijing who got into the Stanley Brothers, Harry McClintock and latterly Ralph Stanley as a result of hearing Oh Brother played on jukeboxes and that's no bad thing.

9. FUGAZI THE ARGUMENT (2001)
Fugazi’s quietest, cleverest album. The Argument makes its point through shifts in dynamics, strange angular guitars and melodies. In the best way possible, it’s Fugazi’s most grown up album, and their most conventionally ‘indie’. By the point that they made this, MacKaye, Picciotto and pals knew so much about song craft that they were well past the conventional pop song stage, and the Argument shows it: songs twist and turn, hooks are buried in codas and the whole is designed so that it slowly burrows its way into your mind over repeated listens. The album is slow-release, and ten years on it’s still growing on me.

8. DRIVE BY TRUCKERS BRIGHTER THAN CREATION'S DARK (2008)
An epic country album, with three very different song-writers contributing their brains and their voices to proceedings. BTCD - like most albums by this prolific band - explores the depressed, nothing-on-TV-so-I'll-beat-my-wife side to the American South. Although Patterson Hood's rough yelp and Mike Cooley's bourbon-smooth baritone have never sounded so sharp, it's the story telling within the song's that really makes the album a fascinating experience. Kicking off with a song about the brutal murder of a man, his wife and their children, the rest of the record deals with crystal meth, suppressed homosexuality, war flashbacks and alcoholism. Enjoy!

7. 2 MANY DJS AS HEARD ON RADIO SOULWAX PT.2 (2002)
Mix-tapes were a bit of a growth industry in the noughties – a necessity at a time when the volume of music recorded was soaring while the traditional methods of discovering it were crumbling. But the first 2 Many DJs record to become available worldwide was a bit different. It nicely summed up the way that the end of the noughties saw genres crumble into irrelevance as a basis for listening taste. Check out the combination of Salt’n’Pepa’s Push It with The Stooges’ No Fun: here you have two songs which are almost retardedly obvious in every way except in their combination. Oh yeah, and the album is fun, really really fun. It’s pretty much a night out in itself.

6. BON IVER FOR EMMA, FOREVER AGO (2008)
Justin Vernon...blah blah blah... winter... tiny hut. Yes, we've heard the story many, many times. While the romantic backplot obviously gives this supremely-badly-named album a hook, it doesn't mean it has to be any good. Luckily it is good - really good. The first thing that grabs you is the multi-tracked falsetto vocals which sound like someone singing to you from the other side of a tiny, frosty window as a blizzard picks up speed. What keeps you coming back to it however, is the ethereal songwriting that manages to fashion memorable, solid - even hummable - tunes out of melodies that sound like they barely made it out of Justin's mouth. Not even in his most lurid, fanciful wet dreams does Coldplay's Chris Martin even come close to this.

5. MGMT ORACULAR SPECTACULAR (2008)
Something we can all agree on. This was a feature of practically every party I went to in the last two years, and it’s probably the music I’ll most associate with the second half of the noughties. The fun half. Okay, so it’s really a producer’s album, and the second half of the album is just phoned in, but the five songs that kick off Oracular Spectacular are such a perfect marriage of shimmering Bowie-esque style with curiously progged out substance that it doesn’t really matter. The fact is that this glorified ep is still one of the best albums of the decade.

4. REVEREND BIZARRE IN THE RECTORY OF THE BIZARRE REVEREND (2002)
Even though it hasn't dated especially well, it's hard to explain what a massive impact this album had on me. A funeral-doom power-trio led by the magisterial Albert Witchfinder, Reverend Bizarre never bettered this, their debut. With nary a prop or fancy effect in sight these three Finish guys laid down no-nonsense, slow-as-molasses riffs for the true believers. Over the top of it all was Albert's frankly inimitable voice, which I refuse to believe wasn't manufactured in a test tube, so perfectly suited is it to the music. What's more, not only do the songs actually go places, the band also inject everything with a winsome sense of humour and irony - not often seen in music of any kind. You'd be an asshole not to like this album.

3. MADVILLAIN MADVILLAINY (2004)
The noughties were the decade that hip-hop conquered the world and, in conquering, lost everything that made it great. But despite the amount of shit that the genre threw up in its dying days as bloated leper king of the airwaves, there were a small number of classic albums and Madvillainy was my favourite of them. The album was founded on the two reasons fans originally loved hip-hop at a time when everyone else in the genre was just ignoring them: verses and sampling. The marriage of MF Doom’s MCing, with his buttersoft pop-culture literate flow, and Madlib’s samples (ranging from the Mothers of Invention to Sun Ra) made this my favourite hip-hop album of the decade.

2. MEW AND THE GLASS HANDED KITES (2005)
Am I the only person who realises how fucking amazing this album is? It's more technical than most math-rock bands, more bombastic than anything Muse could ever do, prettier than pop and far more compelling than the drivel put out by any number of over-hyped indie bands from the last decade. Although 2009's follow-up is arguably superior, Kites is the album which got me on the fanboy bandwagon and demonstrated how far out Mew were willing to go. It boggles the mind that a record which represents such a quantum leap forward for rock music didn't instantly make the band megstars the world over.

1. JOANNA NEWSOM MILK-EYED MENDER (2004)
This album was the quiet hero of the decade for me, and definitely the best thing to come out of the New Weird America stable. Bizarre high pitched voice, unusual main instrument, curious influences (Kora, Indie Folk, Texas Gladden) and songs that catch you at first go. It was one of the strangest but most universal albums I’ve ever heard, like a breath of fresh air at a time when I thought music really wasn’t going anywhere. Milk-Eyed Mender is the sort of album which makes you feel simultaneously proud and protective, like a happy parent.