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#10 Bright Eyes - Lifted, or, The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground (2002)

The best adolescent, pissed-off, confused, unfocused emo-folk album of the past five years, and who cares if it's not a very strongly contested category? Conor Oberst's breakthrough album is incredible, and went a long way to proving that emo shouldn't necessarily be a dirty word. Conor Oberst's lyrics are over the top, loaded with angst and teenage disillusionment that might make some listeners retch. Heck, sometimes they're really just not very good, but the music on Lifted is overflowing with such an astonishing level of unrelenting creativity that it just doesn't matter. The production touches on Lifted are inspired - from the a-new-room-for-a-new-song venue change between "False Advertising" and "You Will?" to the drunken singalongs where the singers are actually drunk - and give the songs a distinct identity of their own. Beyond anything else, Lifted's greatest strength is Oberst's total determination to ensure that his songs sound unique - a goal which he admirably acheives.
#9 Interpol - Turn on the Bright Lights (2002)

Sure, they sound a little like Joy Division, but if you think you can write Interpol off as a clone you're clearly not listening to Turn on the Bright Lights closely enough. Sure enough, at times Paul Banks can sound so much like Ian Curtis, that the backlash machine has every right to take aim, but there's so much more to Interol's debut than intense, brooding vocals and chunky post-punk basslines. Dense basslines and vocal tributes are churned out endlessly by a slew of "revival" groups, but Interpol are just so good at what they do, that their inclusion in the garage-revival scene (populated by half a dozen good bands and around a hundred fashion-hack fakes) could be viewed as an insult. Yeah, they sound like Joy Division, but who cares? It's far more important that Interpol are just downright exceptional at what they do, and Turn on the Bright Lights is an amazing album.
#8 - The Arcade Fire - Fuenral (2004)

Mixing jerky, post-punk style vocals with a distinct, post-rock backing, The Arcade Fire's debut is one of the most passionate and moving albums you'll ever hear. Highly emotional but never close to emo, Funeral is a testament to the fact that emotion can still play an important part in music. With so many releases being highly forced in their emotion, laden with sterile hipster irony, or simply detached and clinical, The Arcade Fire encourage emotional involvement in their music, without ever sounding the slightest bit contrived or self-concsious. The rapid, fuzzy guitars and feverish vocals drive the songs into some incredible uplifting moments, and highlight tracks such as "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," "Rebellion (Lies)" and "Une Annee Sans Lumiere" contain some truly spine-tingling peaks. Angst barely plays a role on Funeral, and for once the emotions we're being asked to become absorbed in are those of beautiful, giddy euphoria.
#7 The Shins - Chutes Too Narrow (2003)

The Shins unique-yet-familiar indie-pop is instantly likeable, and with their second album, the excellent Chutes too Narrow, they perfected their formula with their best songwriting and biggest hooks to date. Alternating between country-tinged instrumentation and boucy, 60s style pop, the album is bursting with originality and contains some of the most incredibly well written songs to come out of the indie-pop scene in years. Best of all, when The Shins are catchy, they're really catchy, with highlights like "Turn a Square," "So Says I" and "Fighting in a Sack" being the most addictive tracks the group have ever recorded.
#6 Boards of Canada - Geogaddi (2002)

Boards of Canada's trademark mix of ambient soundscapes with staggering hip-hop beats is, hands down, the most interesting thing in instrumental electronica today. Geogaddi, the duo's second release, alternates between sprawling tracks that run for five minutes but feel like ten, and mini-interlude snippets and found sounds tying the more fully realised songs together. The best tracks feel truly unique, from the fairground backing of "Julie and Candy" to the incredible melody in "Dawn Chorus," made almost entirely from off-key notes. The songs on Geogaddi favour slow, repetition-based progression, with tiny, subtle adjustments along the way. As such, Geogaddi feels infinitely rewarding, as it continues to reveal new elements to its songs with every listen.
#5 The Microphones - It Was Hot We Stayed In the Water (2000)

The Microphones are one of the few bands who can honestly claim to sound unlike anyone else. Their music blends together a multitude of musical influences - folk, Beach-Boys-style pop, psychedelia, fuzz-rock, electronica and minimalist ambient to name a few - and channels them through a lo-fi world of reversed tape loops, sheets of distortion and incredibly clever production tricks (at one point it sounds quite convincingly like the band may be playing underwater, and this is all from basic analogue recording). Every track on It Was Hot We Stayed in the Water is totally unpredictable, and just when you think you've got the style shifts of tracks like "The Pull" and "(something)" figured out, along comes a completely straightforward yet immensely enjoyable cut, like the midnight crooner "Karl Blau" or the minimalist cover of Eric's Trip's "Sand." To top it all off, the album features what I consider to be the single greatest song of the half-decade - "The Glow" is an immeasurably beautiful, massively creative, ten minute trip into psych-pop heaven. You'll never hear anything else like it.
#4 The Books - The Lemon of Pink (2003)

One of the most instantly loveable albums in existense, The Lemon of Pink posesses an unequalled level of celebratory joy. From the moment the warm banjo twangs and gentle string sections slide over the top of one another, and Anne Doerner says "The lemon ... of pink," things immediately sound special. Every song on this album contains something that'll make you smile, be it quirky voice samples (ranging from Einstein quotes to Japanese air-hostess messages), irresistable instrumentation (such as the brain-melting overlapping strings on "Tokyo") or the numerous sound samples of infectious laughter. The sound collaging techniques on The Lemon of Pink are handled with spectacular precision, resulting in a multicultural masterpiece that's bursting at the seams with ideas. Few other albums, if any, will ever make you feel this good. If you don't fall in love with it, you might not be human.
#3 The Microphones - The Glow, Pt. 2 (2001)

I'll come right out and say it - The Microphones are this decade's greatest band (so far), and Phil Elvrum is its greatest musical genius. It was amazing enough that they managed to put together a release as astoundingly original as It Was Hot We Stayed In the Water, but to surpass it with their very next release is mind-blowing. The Glow, Pt 2 (named as a conceptual sequel to It Was Hot's centrepiece track) is an astounding work, a massively ambitious album which succeeds in translating the beauty of nature straight into a sprawling epic of complex arrangements, carefully placed repetition and ecclectic instrumentation. All the while Elvrum's uniquely angelic voice sits on top of the sonic landscape, drifting to and from the listener with constantly shifting intensity. With it's dense musical textures and brilliant production touches, such as the continual use of panning, the album must be heard on headphones to be fully appreciated.
#2 The Fiery Furnaces - Blueberry Boat (2004)

I adore this album so intensely that even I was a little suprised at its runner-up placement on this list, and I wrote the thing. Overflowing with more ideas than some listeners could keep up with, Blueberry Boat can be an extememly demanding album, needing multiple listens just to absorb what's on the surface. There's just so much to fall in love with - "My Dog Was Lost But Now He's Found" features a lyrical pun followed by an almost too-subtle "boom boom" in the background; the massive guitar solo hiding one minute into "Mason City" feels like lost treasure; the title track's tale of pirates invading a boat to steal its precious blue cargo, only to be confronted by a resilliant captain Elanour, is way better than any children's story, and it's catchy too. There's so much more, but if I keep listing highlights this writeup will end up unusually long. They're scattered throughout the album so generously, it'll take the average listener ten plays just to catch them all. The best part is, it'll then take dozens more listens to satisfy the insatiable urge to hear them over and over again.
#1 Radiohead - Kid A (2000)

Kid A is a monumental album. Across its ten tracks, there is not only a total absense of filler, but there is a total absense of tracks which are merely "good." Every single track on Kid A is a masterpiece - "In Limbo" is a swirling black hole of minimalist electronica and melancholy bass, easily on par with any soundscape Aphex Twin ever put together; "Motion Picture Soundtrack" marks Radiohead's first venture into utilizing the harp, and it sounds so moving it's hard to believe they hadn't tried it before; the back-to-back brilliance of "Idiotech" and "Morning Bell" is an incredible, prolonged highpoint; "Everything in its Right Place" was so good people just decided that it was the album's single, even though no singles were released. "Kid A," "The National Anthem," "How To Disappear Completely," "Treefingers" and "Optimistic" are all just as good, and if you've listened to Kid A you'll understand why I felt the obligation to specifically name-drop every single track on the album. Hard fact: Kid A is better than OK Computer. It's a saddening, darkly beautiful masterpiece which few other albums have ever equalled.

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