PUSHING PAPER

Here we are — the final frontier. These five albums are the ones that really, truly became a part of my life these last ten years. Thank God this list is over with. It’s going to take me another ten years to forget how tired I became of this slog and want to do something like this again. (And I didn’t even write anything about half of these albums.) Until then . . . .

5. The Smashing Pumpkins — MACHINA / The Machines of God (2000)

As the fact that this album landed at number five illustrates, I’m intensely loyal to my favorite artists. (That is, unless they alienate each and every one of their former bandmates, view going on tour as an opportunity to lecture their most dedicated fans, and, of course, start making incredibly shitty music. But I digress.) While MACHINA was panned by critics who didn’t buy into the whole “The Pumpkins are back!” storyline, as a diehard who cared as much about how this album fit into the Pumpkins’ career arc as the quality of the music itself, MACHINA met all my expectations and then some. While I understand those that fault this album for being overproduced, to me it made sense; I’ve always viewed it as a logical progression from Mellon Collie‘s bombast and Adore‘s iciness. And for those who took the easy route of lampooning “Glass and the Ghost Children”, well, all I have to say to you is . . . um, let’s move along. And as we sit back and watch with horror as Billy takes a blowtorch to what remains of the Pumpkins’ legacy, I remind everyone that in 2000 this album stood as the Pumpkins’ swan song. The Pumpkins’ breakup was something I became progressively sadder about for months after its announcement, knowing that a band I loved so much was no longer going to be around to write songs like “Stand Inside Your Love,” “This Time” or “The Age of Innocence” any more. Those songs that swung for the fences and connected, by virtue of their epic choruses and ambitious climaxes. When I listen to MACHINA, I’m not listening to it with my customary critical ear — I’m listening to my favorite band’s last great record. Maybe it isn’t great to you, or to the critics, or to the casual music fan, but it’s great to me.

4. Daft Punk — Discovery (2001)

While we all wipe the tears away from our eyes and recover from reading my MACHINA blurb, I’ll interject briefly to say that I don’t have anything interesting to write about this album. I love it for the same reason that every other person who’s ever listened to it does.

3. Ghostface Killah — The Pretty Toney Album (2004)

The dumbest thing I’ve ever written about music (and this is no small distinction) was my review of The Pretty Toney Album where I only gave it three out of five stars. Mercifully, I was not able to find it online. It was fairly early in my music critic days, and as I wrote the review, I grappled internally with how to objectively evaluate an album by an artist I thought so highly of, and overcompensated by harping on the album’s few flaws. Consider this, along with the fact that I named my column the following year The Pretty Toney Column, my attempt to set the record straight.

In fairness, this album is a grower in the most classic sense, which is especially unusual within rap. Most rap albums play like a gargantuan list of hopeful singles, and are constructed fairly predictably. That Pretty Toney was a different animal escaped me. I knew the intro was the greatest rap skit of all time, and I knew “Biscuits” was an instant classic, but the brilliance of tracks like “Ghostface” was lost on me initially. Come summer time, it was rare that it left my car’s CD player. I obviously get why people love Supreme Clientele so much (after all, it placed 64th on this list), but how this album isn’t universally viewed as the crowning achievement of Ghost’s solo career is beyond me. Pretty Toney seamlessly captures all of his moods, all of his styles, and all of his sounds — and the album flows along as smoothly as any revered rock album. So please allow me to revise my original score from three stars to seventeen.

2. Clipse — We Got It 4 Cheap Vol. 2 (2005)

This album, and the insanely good songs contained within, don’t really tie into my biography all that much, probably because I’m not a drug dealer. This mixtape, as much as anything else released this decade, represent the incredible experience of becoming uncontrollably obsessed with an artist, when an album of theirs is pretty much the only thing you listen to for months at a time. I’d followed the Clipse’s odyssey closely after Lord Willin’ came out. I anticipated Hell Hath No Fury like it was Christmas, only to be disappointed time and time again. Then this found its way onto my hard drive and the rest was history. There isn’t another album I’ve liked nearly as much as WGI4C2 since it came out. I’ll be surprised if I ever do.

1. The Avalanches — Since I Left You (2000)

Here’s to the most well-constructed album of the decade — after all, the Avalanches somehow built an album entirely out of samples and still managed to bookend it perfectly. Here’s to the most original album of the decade — at least to me. Here’s to an album that opened my mind to electronic music — Boards of Canada and Autechre aren’t anyway near this list without Since I Left You. Here’s to “Live At Dominoes” — one of the greatest songs ever. And here’s to the Avalanches themselves. They may never be able to create a proper follow-up, but that’s okay. Part of me wanted to place something else at the top of this list, but they left me with no choice.