Spitball Army

I’ve been on a hiatus from music magazines for about a year.

Actually, that statement above is only partly correct. I still receive the American Record Guide every other month, as I had paid them for a multi-year subscription a while back; Paste still sends me their pocket-size leaflet every month or so; and I receive Rolling Stone because the one-year-for-ten-bucks deal that I stumbled on about nine months ago was too good a deal to pass up.

But I did put a stop to purchasing music-related periodicals off the newsstand near on twelve months ago. This was done in an effort to curb spending money on music (which I had reduced to a crawl, really) and to eliminate temptation (which is ever-present, naturally). It’s been working out.

This week, however, I picked up the November issue of Uncut, the one touting Jack White as the “Man of the Decade” on its cover. That was intriguing enough. But what really grabbed my attention was their list of “THE 150 GREATEST ALBUMS OF THE 21ST CENTURY…SO FAR!”

The list reaches questionably at times, but 150 GREAT albums in just under ten years is a tough – and, obviously, subjective – feat to pull off successfully.  In some cases, it seems as easy as just including full artist discographies for the last ten years (Radiohead, The Raconteurs, Johnny Cash).  In the case of some artists, glaring omissions can be spotted (even though the Drive-By Truckers’ Decoration Day is mentioned in the blurb for their The Dirty South as confirming the band’s status as chroniclers of the Southern experience, it failed to make the list).

Largely, however, these are solid selections, especially in the upper tier.  Here is Uncut‘s top ten, with my comments and suggestions for alterations:

10. Fleet Foxes / Fleet Foxes – Great album. Deserved.

9. Ryan Adams / Heartbreaker – I never warmed up to this record, though I know to most people it is somewhat iconic. My preference is for the Whiskeytown material (it’s all pre-2000) or the mellower stuff (Love is Hell or Easy Tiger).  I wouldn’t really quibble with this placement, but I’d place his Love is Hell on the list, from which it was wrongly omitted.

8. Bob Dylan / Modern Times – Bob’s best album since 1997’s Time Out of Mind.  It shares space in this top ten with Love and Theft (#2), which just seems wrong.  Remove Love and Theft and move this one up a few notches.

7. The Arcade Fire / Funeral – Deserved. Terrific album by a risk-taking band that stretches musical boundaries.

6. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss / Raising Sand – No. This is a good album, but No.  Take it out and in its place put, say, Sufjan Stevens’ Illinois or Michigan, which spawned (or grew out of) a contemporary folk-pop scene that stretches from Iron & Wine to Bon Iver.  Or maybe Bright Eyes’ I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning, which could be similarly described.

5. The Strokes / Is This It – Eh, okay.

4. Brian Wilson / Smile – I love this record, but can’t agree with this positioning.  Leave it on the list, lower, and bring up Amy Winehouse’s Back to Black.  Back to Black, while being a terrific listen itself, and probably the only good album we’ll ever get from this artist, also represents a string of outstanding collections of contemporary soul which includes albums by Joss Stone, Lewis Taylor, Jill Scott, the new Maxwell CD and several hip-hop releases (not rap…rap is dead).

3. Wilco / A Ghost Is Born – Again: right artist, wrong album choice.  This spot should be occupied by Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (#35).  What were the editors thinking?  Those Krautrock experiments on Ghost were “skip track” inducing.

2. Bob Dylan / Love and Theft – Since we’ve already removed this one, let’s fill it with something unpredictable and nutty, like Portugal the Man’s Satanic Satanist album.  That one’s good.  That’s my choice for “head-scratching inclusion.”

1. The White Stripes / White Blood Cells – I won’t argue.  Jack White is, after all, the “Man of the Year.” And I like this band a lot. I lean toward Elephant and Get Behind Me Satan (there’s that pesky devil again), but this one is good, too.  Like Ryan Adams’ Heartbreaker, others that I know who have traveled this record more times than I swear by its superiority.  I won’t argue.