Tag: The 2000’s
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Kanye West ‘Graduation’ (2007)
The legacy of Kanye West as a cultural figure is still being written and it’s sure as hell complicated. Following a public break with his long-time wife Kim Kardashian and a failed Presidential bid in 2020, West (who was always a lightning rod for controversy) delved further into the obscene, making numerous antisemitic comments that…
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Mastodon ‘Crack The Skye’ (2009)
Mastodon’s excellent 2009 album Crack The Skye sounds like Ozzy Osbourne did some LSD and decided to write a sludge metal record. That’s the best way to describe it in a nutshell, but peek under the covers and there is an incredible amount going on as Mastodon’s mastery over metal is the stuff of recent…
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Black Rebel Motorcycle Club ‘B.R.M.C’ (2001)
Black Rebel Motorcycle Club has largely been somewhat of a cult underground rock band for over two decades now, dipping into the mainstream during the garage rock revival in the mid 2000’s. They are a rock fan’s rock band through and through— grimy guitars, garage rock edgy drums, bass tones loaded with fuzz, and straightforward…
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The Flaming Lips ‘Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots’ (2002)
The Flaming Lips 2002 album Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots was somewhat of a watershed moment in Indie pop history. Featuring a bevy of electronic instruments, dreamy delays, and wispy vocals from frontman Wayne Coyne, the album played a sizable role in taking traditional pop music song structures and blending them with the avant-garde to…
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Sum 41 ‘All Killer, No Filler’ (2001)
With news that Sum 41 will finally be hanging up the guitars after 27 years together, it only felt right to dust off All Killer, No Filler and take it for a spin this week. This was the album that started it all for the Canadian punk rockers off the heels of their massive hit…
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Sugarcult ‘Start Static’ (2001)
Start Static will forever remind me of freshman and sophomore year high school. It’s where Sugarcult sort of started and ended for me in terms of any sort of regular listening cadence, and outside of the off the cuff nostalgic spin of “Stuck In America” once a year or so, it’s safe to say it’s…
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AFI ‘Sing The Sorrow’ (2003)
I love a good epic album opener and holy hot damn does Sing The Sorrow ever have a massive album opener. “Miseria Cantare: The Beginning” gets the ol’ heart rate going immediately with those big kick drums, gang vocal chants, and epic operatic synths. The first AFI album I fell in love with was The…
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Broken Social Scene ‘You Forgot It In People’ (2002)
Broken Social Scene were Indie darlings in the early aughts, known for their ambient instrumentals and song structures that featured an eclectic collection of musicians. What I’ve always appreciated about the group is how freely their members floated in and out of the group. Over the course of their 25-year history as a band, Broken…
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Killswitch Engage ‘The End of Heartache’ (2004)
I was a sophomore in high school when The End of Heartache first dropped. It represented my first foray into what I would call pure modern metal. I’d been listening to the forebears of metal like Black Sabbath and Thin Lizzy for a minute, but hadn’t quite dabbled in the true dark arts yet. And…
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Kirk Franklin ‘The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin’ (2002)
Kirk Franklin is a modern contemporary gospel singer and this live collection of some of his most popular songs. The Rebirth of Kirk Franklin was recorded live at Lakewood Church, a non-denominational evangelical megachurch in Houston, Texas that has one of the largest congregations in the United States with about 45,000 coming through its doors…
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Brooks & Dunn ‘Red Dirt Road’ (2003)
Kix Brooks and Ronnie Dunn are nothing short of icons in country music, a duo entirely synonymous with the honky tonk mainstream country sound that dominated the airwaves in the 90’s and early aughts. You know exactly what you’re getting when you throw on a Brooks & Dunn record– Telecasters with crunchy tone, drums that…
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The Hold Steady ‘Boys and Girls in America’ (2006)
Boys and Girls in America was an incredibly formative album for me. I was maybe a month in to my freshman year of college when the album dropped, and after previously falling in love with The Hold Steady’s concept album Separation Sunday, which is quite honestly a must-listen as well for any fan of rich…
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50 Cent ‘Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ (2003)
Music in the early 2000’s still was largely controlled by the labels– this was the era before the proliferation of mainstream streaming services, and though Napster and other peer-to-peer networks could give artists a grassroots buzz, physical CD’s were still king. In other words, the the right marketing campaign still moved the needle for artists.…
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Justice ‘Cross’ (2007)
Three things worth saying about this album: Standout Songs: “Genesis”, “D.A.N.C.E.”, “Phantom Pt. II” LISTEN ON SPOTIFY
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The Hives ‘Veni Vidi Vicious’ (2000)
The garage rock revival in the 2000’s was a glorious time in music history and no band better captured that unhinged energy for high school me than The Hives. I remember popping this CD into my navy blue Walkman one day and literally playing this album over and over and over again everywhere I went—…
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Between The Buried And Me ‘Colors’ (2007)
When one of Dream Theater’s co-founders names your album his favorite of the year you know you’ve made it in the prog metal scene. That was the case for Between The Buried and Me and their album Colors when prog-rock legend drummer Mike Portnoy (along with numerous other publications) named this 65-minute eclectic journey the…
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Pat Green ‘Wave on Wave’ (2003)
It’s been nearly 20 years since I’ve listened to Pat Green (as an old friend recently reminded me, Green was the soundtrack to many late nights of debauchery during high school), which meant that during the album listen I was stuck somewhere in between the present tense and the past, filled with nostalgia for country…
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The Darkness ‘Permission to Land’ (2003)
All The Darkness do is write bangers. This is one of my favorite hard rock albums of all-time for the simple reason that it is fun as hell and has no interest in pretending to be anything otherwise. Modern rock music in general has the unfortunate malaise of sometimes being a little too self-important, and…
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The xx ‘xx’ (2009)
The xx are almost as much as an aesthetic as they are a music group. Featuring guitars drenched in reverby delay, light electronic drum machines, subtle ambient synths, and thick bass lines that pulsate underneath it all, their minimalism is just as important as their message. Frankly it’s safe to say it’s more so. Softly…
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Thursday ‘War All The Time’ (2003)
Compared to their mid-2000’s emo contemporaries, Thursday always felt mature beyond their years. Their subject matter wasn’t about shallow yearnings of lost love or feelings of victimhood that sort of defined the genre as a whole. They focused their energy toward discussing the horrors of war, frustrations of the working class, complexities in relationships, and…
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Get Back Loretta ‘Over The Wall’ (2006)
Get Back Loretta is a deep cut. I can’t recall the first time I heard this album, who introduced it to me, or even the timespan in which I listened to it. Their Wikipedia and social media pages are quite bare. Best I can tell it looks like they were active in San Diego during…
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Cassino ‘Sounds of Salvation’ (2007)
Cassino’s lead singer Nick Torres is one of my favorite lyricists of all-time, both from his stint in pop-punk band Northstar and his subsequent folk rock project Cassino. Torres and childhood friend Tyler Odom actually formed Cassino after Northstar broke up in the mid-2000’s, putting down their overdriven guitars for a subtler indie/folk sound. And…
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He Is Legend ‘I Am Hollywood’ (2004)
I remember seeing He Is Legend live with From First To Last shortly after this album was released and being absolutely floored by the energy they brought to their live show. I’ve always been a sucker for southern rock metal and all the epic guitar-driven lead parts that come along with that genre, and this…
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Moulin Rouge ‘The Soundtrack’ (2001)
Moulin Rouge was a cultural earthquake in my early teen years and one of the formative films for many millennials now in their mid-30’s. It’s a visually stunning film and an operatic soundtrack that fits the mood perfectly. The soundtrack is composed almost entirely of cover songs with their own over-the-top spin on them– it’s…
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The Honorary Title ‘Anything Else but the Truth’ (2006)
Once upon a time The Honorary Title served as a transformational musical intersection for me, blending teenage love for emo music and burgeoning adulthood love for indie/folk into one clean experience. At one point in my life they may have been my favorite band, and at the same point in my life I’m confident one…
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The Bronx ‘The Bronx’ (2003)
The Bronx is a shot of adrenaline after getting punched in the face. Pure hardcore punk rock poetry. Besides the fact it’s just a fun as hell 28-minute ride, this album deserves a spin based solely off its killer cover art. It’s one my favorite album covers of all-time because it tells you exactly what…
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John Mayer ‘Continuum’ (2006)
At one point in his career John Mayer was a great dichotomy. He soared to incredible mainstream popularity with a rogue smile, a holier-than-thou intellectual superiority, and catchy pop tunes. His virtuouso guitar playing was alluded to, but never really focused on, the press focus instead covering his lurid dating history. In other words, one…
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Rilo Kiley ‘More Adventurous’ (2004)
One thing I love most about Rilo Kiley is the witty lyrical wordplay that frontwoman Jenny Lewis is known for. From the opening lines of “It’s A Hit” it’s hard to tell if Lewis is singing a song or doing a tight ten at the Laugh Factory, waxing poetic about all the idiosyncrasies of human…
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Audioslave ‘Audioslave’ (2002)
With all due respect to Robert Plant, Axl Rose and Bon Scott, Chris Cornell is the GOAT of pure rock-and-roll vocalists. In fact, I would argue it’s not even very close. Along with his incredible four-octave range, Cornell’s ability to hit that distorted gravel scream in an explosive chorus after an intimate verse delivered in…
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Avril Lavigne ‘Let Go’ (2002)
Somewhere in the pantheon of pop punk’s meteoric rise to the mainstream lies a statue of Avril Lavigne, transfixed with a deadpan stare, clad in a black t-shirt and frayed jeans. It’s hard to overstate just how much Lavigne changed the game for punk in the early aughts, especially for female artists whose role in…
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Incubus ‘A Crow Left of the Murder…’ (2004)
Incubus means a lot to many people who mean a lot to me. This was a special album to get under the belt early in the year. The album kicks off with an absolute howitzer in “Megalomaniac”, which still stands as one of the best album openers in rock history. This is Incubus at their…
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Keith Urban ‘Golden Road’ (2002)
What Keith Urban lacks in sonic exploration he more than makes up in stellar production, tight arrangements, bubblegum melodies, and technically diverse guitar work. These roads may have been paved over many times before, but there’s still some gold in here nonetheless. Standout Songs: “Somebody Like You”, “You’ll Think of Me” LISTEN ON SPOTIFY
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