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CURRENT TEN
Azzido da Bass: "Doom's Night (Timo Maas Remix)"
Buddy Guy: "Tramp"
Duke Ellington: "Take the 'A' Train"
Mr. Len featuring Jean Grae: "Taco Day"
Clinic: "The Return of Evil Bill"
Ultramagnetic MC's: "Poppa Large"
Prince: "Erotic City"
Arto Lindsay: "Erotic City"
Count Basie: "Honeysuckle Rose"
Alicia Keys: "Fallin'"

Ladies and gentlemen,
2001 in review. The A-List, plus pending albums and top ten singles. Enjoy! (n.b.--some of this stuff appeared elsewhere first, in City Pages, Creative Loafing Atlanta, Chicago Reader, Stereo-Type, and I Love Music. thanks to all)

1. Basement Jaxx, Rooty (Astralwerks) The nerviest house album ever or the best Prince record since Sign ‘o’ the Times? Sellout of house’s sacred spirit or affirmation of same by kicking purism out of the equation and dragging it the fuck out of its self-styled good-taste ghetto? Post-rave as post-punk or as post-disco? All of the above, baby: block-party ragga plays laser tag with giddy Latin house skips rope with old-school rave synth-blat rubs sensuously against Prince at his purplest. Where’d it all go? Right here.

2. Clinic, Internal Wrangler (Domino) This must be what they mean by meta. The highest of the many high points on Liverpool quartet Clinic’s perfect debut (following a brilliant self-titled import-only EPs roundup) comes at the climax of “Distortions,” a buzzing, soaring ballad two-thirds into the album. Over a tinny beatbox and thin organ drone, vocalist Ade Blackburn dolefully beseeches, “Free of distortions/Free of distortions.” It’s a wish for a life less complicated, and here it is, stuck in the middle of an album whose sonic calling card is the trebly fuzzbox guitars of songs like “C.Q.” and “Hippy Death Suite.” There’s lots of musical cross-referencing happening on Internal Wrangler, from “The Return of Evil Bill” and “T.K.” calling to mind a three-way sound-clash between Augustus Pablo, Ennio Morricone and Wire, to the Hammer horror organ (via Bernie Worrell’s more macabre Funkadelic work) of “DJ Shangri-La,” to the doleful Velvet Underground-ish ballad, “Earth Angel.” And it’s hard not to think of Clinic’s greatest benefactors, Radiohead, albeit if that combo were a punky surf-garage band with a more fully developed sense of musical mischief, not to mention rhythm. True, it’s not really singer Ade Blackburn’s fault that his beseeching voice resembles that of Thom Yorke. But his mincing whine comes across with a sneer at nearly every turn--the engaging, even cute sneer of an 8-year-old with a Mohawk and leather jacket--as opposed to Yorke’s like-it-or-not weight-of-the-world moan.

3. Daft Punk, Discovery (Virgin) No surprise Thomas Bangalter and Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo did all the publicity for their second album in robot drag: they’ve always had a glazed fascination with anonymity and technology. But even if nearly every sound on Discovery was mercilessly processed, the revelation came from its enormous emotional expanses. “One More Time” and “Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger” swelled from dancefloor monsters into pop miracles; “Digital Love” featured the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man proposing to his girlfriend over a thrillingly cheesy riff. As for the cavernous deep house of “Too Long”: the drugs may have worn off, but it’s still Saturday night forever.

4. Bob Dylan, “Love and Theft” (Columbia) The stuff that sounds lesser at first here (the ballads mostly) just keeps on gaining presence with repeat plays; the stuff that sounds great early (rockers like “Lonesome Day Blues” and “Honest with Me”) just get better and better. The band cooks--every song has a riff that grabs and holds and doesn’t let go, and considering that each one plays throughout that says a lot. The singing is terrific--if Poptasticness is all you care about, your loss (as usual). Dylan sounds ancient, he sounds thumbtack sharp and whiskey-flavored wry; it’s some of the best singing he’s ever done. And for all the lyrical strokes, after a solid three-plus months’ exposure I still don’t know what half the words are because I’m so busy listening to the band and the singing. Plus, the funniest thing on the record isn’t even a verbal joke, though there’s plenty of those--it’s the organ on “Bye and Bye,” which still cracks me up. His funniest album since Bringing It All Back Home and his funnest since Nashville Skyline.

5. The Avalanches, Since I Met You (Modular/Sire) Is this a concept album? At the least, the debut of sample-happy Aussie sextet the Avalanches feels vaguely thematic. Not only do each of its 18 tracks seamlessly segue into each another, but the songs constantly cross-reference one another: a whinnying horse pops up in both “Stay Another Season” and “Frontier Psychiatrist,” and the first two songs on the album are hooked by the line, “Since I left you/I found a world so new.”

Coming at the album’s beginning, that sentiment puts a distinct stamp on how we hear the rest of the album. The music is a squishy, playful take on a variety of club styles--disco’s sinuous thump, late-Eighties hip hop’s sampledelic fever dreams, downtempo and ambient’s kitschy twitter. So you might call Since I Left You a map of bumpy emotional terrain, surveying the thrill and dread of leaving a constricting relationship and entering the wider world--in this case, the night world of club culture--in order to find yourself. Not that you’d necessarily know it from the words, which are often absurd (“Frontier Psychiatrist” jumbles professorial voices declaring, “You’re a nut! You’re crazy in the coconut!”), or nonspecific (lots of ooohs and ululations). But who said concept albums had to be linear? Did anyone ever figure out the “plot” of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band?

Anyway, that’s just my interpretation. As with the Beatles’ most feted opus, there are plenty of other possible readings available here. For instance, you could hear Since I Left You as a broadside about copyright law being the hobgoblin of little minds. Constructed from some 900 samples, the album was released a year ago in Australia: The gap between then and its recent American issue came in large part from difficulties in negotiating the use of Madonna’s “Holiday,” a chunk of which buoys the song “Stay Another Season.” Like the Beastie Boys’ Paul’s Boutique refracted through the rave-kissed bliss-out of Primal Scream’s “Loaded,” Since I Left You is ecstatic with the endless possibilities of sound, grounded in some of the airiest grooves ever constructed.

In fact, the album’s most intriguing aspect is its blithe kitschiness. Part of this is purely technical: By abjuring the sonic extremities of most post-rave production (sizzling high end, gut-wrenching bottom), the Avalanches situate everything in a comfortable midrange, so everything sounds as fuzzy-warm as the cheesy orchestral recordings the album utilizes in excelsis. (That accentuated midrange is one reason the album feels conceptual--it’s more like a record about club music than of it.)

But like Daft Punk, the Avalanches conflate disco and Seventies arena pop as lost vistas of possibility, minus the smirk of yer Urge Overkills. Just as “Digital Love” (from Discovery) is the sound of Giorgio Moroder rewriting the “Layla” riff, the Avalanches approach mindless soundtrack prettiness as a state of grace. The difference is that Daft Punk evoke giddy possibility viscerally, with a glossy loop or heaving bassline. They’re more sonically literal, while the Avalanches are literal lyrically: They’ll loop “book a flight tonight” over a jittery electro-groove, without saying where that flight leads. Like the vocal sprite says at the top of the album, where we find this “world so new” is up to us.

6. DJ /rupture, Gold Teeth Thief (Soot/History of the Future/ www.negrophonic.com) “Give me two records and I’ll make you a universe,” DJ Spooky once wrote. Jace Clayton, a.k.a. DJ /rupture, goes him one better: not only does he have the skills to back up such a claim, unlike Spooky, but on this headwrecking two-part set, he reconstructs the sound of the world we live in. A former Boston drum & bass DJ currently residing in Spain, he mixes up hip-hop, dancehall, dub, Indian, North and South African music, gabber, glitchcore, and 20th-century composition into an unbelievably well-plotted whole: it’s simultaneously abrading and compulsively listenable like nothing since prime Public Enemy. Clayton’s spent the last five years obsessively studying North African music, and his emphasis on Arabicisms both real and received (the genius opening mix of “Get Ur Freak On” and “Oochie Wally”) has special resonance post-9/11: there may be no more haunting album sequence this year than the disc’s ending, which moves from Muslimgauze’s “The Taliban” to Paul Simon with Ladysmith Black Mambazo’s “Homeless” to a gorgeous live track by Miriam Makeba, a 30-year exile from her native South Africa during apartheid. All this plus Rude-Ass Tinker’s insane deconstruction of “U Can’t Touch This,” the funniest piece of hip-hop-mangling laptopia ever and a good match for Negativland’s “U2.”

7. The Coup, Party Music (75 Ark) Boots Riley’s timing couldn’t have possibly been worse. Between May 15 and June 1, the Oakland activist and rapper conceived and finished the front cover for Party Music, the fourth album from his group the Coup and their debut on San Francisco producer Dan the Automator’s 75 Ark label. In the photograph, a smirking Boots pushed a button on a guitar tuner as each of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers went up in a ball of fire behind him and DJ Pam the Funkstress. The metaphor might have been a little muddled, especially since the tuner could be easily mistaken for a bomb detonator, but the message—self-described Communist rap group killing capitalism with their music—was fairly clear. The album’s scheduled release date? September 11.

Obviously, once the cover proved prophetic in the worst possible way, down to the actual location of the Towers’ points of impact being uncannily similar to where the actual explosions took place, things changed fast. The album was pulled immediately, its release date put off ‘til November. At first Riley wanted to leave the cover intact (“If I kept that cover, it would give me at least a platform to expose the realities of what’s going on, the blood that happened on Tuesday is on the hands of the U.S. government,” he reasoned dubiously to Seattle newspaper The Stranger), but 75 Ark wisely pulled it anyway.

As such, the ensuing controversy has threatened to overshadow the best album the Coup has ever made. The politics that have always been integral to Riley’s lyrics may not be as carefully thought out as “The Communist Manifesto,” but in pop music, slogans go a long way, and there are some great ones here: “I’m anti-Republican and anti-Democratic/ If they self-destruct, that’s anti-climactic,” Riley declares on the pendulum-swanging “Ride the Fence.” “5 Million Ways to Kill a C.E.O.” promises that “You can do it funk or do it disco.” “Everythang” challenges, “Everybody get your shit started/ This is y’all motherfuckin’ party!” Just as crucial are more personal songs like Riley’s gorgeous bull-headed ode to his young daughter, “Wear Clean Draws” (“Tell your teachers I said princesses are evil/ How they got all they money was they killed people”), and “Nowalaters,” an open letter to an old girlfriend who tried to pin on Boots a pregnancy he wasn’t responsible for.

Just as effective as Riley’s buttery drawl and hard-nosed lyrics is the music itself. Though Pam the Funkstress helped some (her scratch cameo on “Draws” damn near steals this album), and Tahir contributed the track of “Get Up,” on which Dead Prez appear, Riley handled most of the production himself. “I was listening to a lot of Prince when I made the album,” he said before Party Music was released. “A lot of the keyboards were inspired by him. And Fela Kuti was a big inspiration, because he really put music and politics together in a way that didn’t take away from either.” Context may have shifted some of Riley’s original intentions, but Party Music’s call to consciousness remains as invigorating--and necessary--as ever.

8. Superlongevity (Perlon import) Disco’s extrovert image to the contrary, dance music has often been as much about interiority as exteriority. The intimate beats and voluptuous textures can evoke the small, velvet-lined back room of a hip boîte, and an arrangement’s melismatic sweep can capture the emotional upheavals of the people making the music and those who are dancing to it. No recent club music has delved inward more seductively than the genre scene aficionados dub “microhouse.” Merging the abrupt, cut-off musical phrases of laptop glitchmeisters like Oval with the filtered whooshes of techno at its dry-iciest and the warm post-disco thump of Chicago house, the style is the aural equivalent of projecting a minute detail onto a wall-sized canvas--only with the inevitable grainy blur replaced by deeper detail and richer color. Like Luomo’s Vocalcity--a lustrous tour de force of spacey, spaced-out grooves released last year on Frankfurt’s Force Tracks label--Superlongevity, a mixed compilation on the German label Perlon, is a masterwork of sustained eroticism. It’s music so rapturously carnal you get the feeling that the CD’s title is a tribute to those who can fuck through its entire two and a half hours. (More likely, it’s a clever way to sneak the label’s name into its product: SuPERLONgevity.) The grooves get right next to you, and the sucking, clacking, popping, and brushing noises breathe into your ear, from the three-note water-glass tinkle that runs through Markus Nicolai’s “Dimbied.Shake” to the eye-popping scratch-noises and sultry spoken Spanish female vocals in Narcotic Syntax’s “Merenguerilla.” The low-end tones of “Windowshopping,” by Baby Ford & Zip--heartbeat pulse, droplets of sub-bass, what sounds like church-bell samples subjected to Black Sabbath-level detuning--offset clipped high hat sweeps and a repeated female chhh. And the undulating piano figure and cathedral door-slam afternoise of Akufen’s “The Unexpected Guest” could occupy the background of an Anne Rice novel--or, perhaps more to the point, one by A.N. Roquelaure. You too may never want to see the daylight again.

9. Atmosphere, Lucy Ford (Rhymesayers Entertainment) Plenty of hip-hoppers know how to write about male-female relationships, but few cut as close to the bone as Minneapolis native Sean Daley, aka Slug, half of the duo Atmosphere. Take Lucy Ford‘s “Don’t Ever Fucking Question That,” on which he proclaims, “I love you/Don’t ever fucking question that/That’s why we’ll probably never get along/If I was better at finding the right words to say/I wouldn’t need to write these motherfucking songs.” Or “The Woman With the Tattooed Hands,” a dream narrative in which the tattoos come to life and make love to the woman herself as Slug watches: “I didn’t get turned on, I just got turned/I wasn’t as aroused as I was concerned/For each one of ‘em I’ve hurt every time I’ve been burned/I’ve got a lot to teach but even more to learn.” Sounding as much like Jeremy Enigk with a beatbox as a stepson of KRS-One or a cousin of Eminem, Slug worries a lot: “I need to start writing pieces about other people’s problems/ Because the strangers are starting to get worried,” he notes on “It Goes.” But over the lazy funk samples of producer Ant, he also manages to sound jauntily confident--contemplative and party-rocking at the same time. And despite Slug’s predilection for soul-searching, he knows when to lighten up: On “Guns and Cigarettes,” he brags, “I wanna be bigger than Jesus/And bigger than wrestling/Bigger than the Beatles/And bigger than breast implants.” Thing is, he’s got the skills to make it happen.

10. The Moldy Peaches (Rough Trade/Sanctuary) Peg their sound as Beat Happening or Jonathan Richman with their minds in the gutter, or an American Television Personalities. Adam Green and Kimya Dawson revel in so much wanton sex, drug abuse and nose-thumbing amorality you might mistake them for extras in a Larry Clark vehicle. But in “Steak for Chicken,” they sing, “We’re not those Kids sitting on the couch.” For one thing, they’re far more joyful, as one listen to “Downloading Porn With Davo,” (“Sucking dick for ecstasy”), “Steak for Chicken” (“Who’m I gonna stick my dick in?”), and the self-explanatory “Who’s Got the Crack” will attest. Lines like “I’m running out of ethnic friends” and “I used to be dead but now I’m gay” are so calculated, you don’t notice the melodies surrounding them until they’ve been rattling around your head for weeks. And the Peaches perform them so exuberantly that it’s easy to forgive misfires like Green’s whack-white-guy rap “On Top” or Dawson’s lo-fi punk stomp through “Little Bunny Foo Foo.” But they’re given dimension by the group’s surprisingly tender undertone. When Dawson croons wistfully about wanting nothing more than to spoon, ride bikes and watch cartoons on “Nothing Came Out,” she sounds like she means it -- even if she does end the song by declaring herself “just your average Thundercats ho.”

RUNNERS UP:
11. Black Box Recorder: The Facts of Life (Jetset)
12. Michael Franti & Spearhead: Stay Human (Six Degrees)
13. Old 97’s: Satellite Rides (Elektra)
14. Orlando Cachaito Lopez: Cachaito (World Circuit/Nonesuch)
15. System of a Down: Toxicity(American)
16. Richie Hawtin: DE9: Closer to the Edit (Novamute)
17. Derrick L. Carter: “About Now...”: Six Eleven DJ Mix Series V. 3 (611)
18. Dungeon Family: Even in Darkness (LaFace/Arista)
19. 500% Dynamite! (Soul Jazz import)
20. Aceyalone: Accepted Eclectic (Project Blowed)
21. Bob Dylan: Live 1961-2000—Thirty-Nine Years of Great Concert Performances (Sony Japan import)
22. Stephen Malkmus (Matador)
23. Masta Ace: Disposable Arts (JCOR)
24. Hypercity: Forcetracks Mixed by Andrew Weatherall (Forcetracks)
25. Crooked Fingers: Bring on the Snakes (Warm)
26. Macy Gray: The Id (Epic)
27. Petey Pablo: Diary of a Sinner: 1st Entry (Jive)
28. Clem Snide: The Ghost of Fashion (SpinART)
29. Jay-Z: The Blueprint (Roc-a-Fella/Def Jam)
30. The Beat: Go-Go’s Fusion of Funk and Hip-Hop (Liaison)
31. Miles Davis: Live at the Fillmore East (March 7, 1970) (Columbia/Legacy)
32. De La Soul: AOI: Bionix (Tommy Boy)
33. Heavenly vs. Satan (K)
34. Luna: Live (Arena Rock)
35. Rarewerks (Astralwerks)
36. The Dismemberment Plan: Change (DeSoto)
37. The Apples in Stereo: Let's Go! (SpinART)
38. Babyface: Face2Face (LaFace/Arista)
39. Chitlin’ Circuit Soul! (Rhino)
40. Les Savy Fav: Go Forth (Frenchkiss)
41. Leonard Cohen: Ten New Songs (Columbia)
42. Willie Nelson: Rainbow Connection (Island)
43. Burnt Sugar/the Arkestra Chamber: Blood on the Leaf: Opus no. 1 (Trugroid)
44. Takashi Hirayasu & Bob Brozman: Nankuru Naisa (World Music Network)
45. Aesop Rock: Labor Days (Def Jux)
46. Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea (Smithsonian Folkways)
47. Utah Saints: Two (Nettwerk America)
48. Missy Elliott: Miss E...So Addictive (The Gold Mind, Inc./Elektra)
49. DJ Dan: In Stereo (Kinetic)
50. Baaba Maal: Mi Yeewnii (Missing You) (Palm Pictures)
51. Tim Fielding: Journeys by DJ: Ley Lines (JDJ)
52. City High (Booga Basement/Interscope)
53. Nuggets II: Original Artyfacts from the British Empire and Beyond (Rhino)
54. Masada: Live at Tonic 2001 (Tzadik)
55. Paul McCartney: Driving Rain (Capitol)
56. Azeem: Craft Classic (Stray)
57. Death Cab for Cutie: The Photo Album (Barsuk)
58. Stanton Warriors: The Stanton Session (XL)
59. Radiohead: Amnesiac (Capitol)
60. Jake Mandell: Love Songs for Machines (Carpark)
61. Imitation Electric Piano (Drag City)
62. The Strokes: Is This It (RCA)
63. Gavin Hardkiss: Through Rose Tinted Glasses (Shadow)
64. Jonathan Richman: Her Mystery Not of High Heels and Eye Shadow (Vapor)
65. Gomma Audio no. 1: Music from the Gomma Label (Shadow)
66. American Analog Set: Know by Heart (Tiger Style)
67. Aaliyah (Blackground/Atlantic)
68. Tomb Raider (Elektra)
69. David Axelrod (Mo’ Wax/Beggars Banquet)
70. Lucinda Williams: Essence (Lost Highway)
71. Radiohead: I Might Be Wrong: Live Recordings (Capitol)
72. John Acquaviava: Mainhatten Sound (Shadow)
73. Troubleman Mix-Tape (Troubleman Unlimited)

NEED TO HEAR MORE:
Bombay 2: Electric Vindaloo (Motel)
Manu Chao: Proxima Estacion: Esperanza (Virgin)
Ghostface Killah: Bulletproof Wallets (Razor Sharp/Epic)
Ghost World (Shanachie)
Neil Landstrumm: She Took a Bullet Meant for Me (Tresor)
Mr. Len: Pity the Fool (Matador)
Nils Petter Molvaer: Solid Ether (ECM)
Pure Garage IV (Warner ESP import)
Sensational: Get on My Page (Ipecac)
Slayer: God Hates Us All (American)
Snowpatrol: When It’s All Over We Still Have to Clear Up (Jeepster)
James “Blood” Ulmer: Memphis Blood: The Sun Sessions (Label M)
Vital 2Step (V2)
The White Stripes: White Blood Cells (Sympathy for the Record Industry)

TOP TEN SINGLES
1. Missy Elliott: “Get Ur Freak On” (The Gold Mind, Inc./Elektra)
2. Daft Punk: “One More Time” (Virgin)
3. Daft Punk: “Digital Love” (Virgin)
4. Nelly: “Ride wit’ Me” (Universal)
5. Petey Pablo: “Raise Up” (Jive)
6. Basement Jaxx: “Romeo” (Astralwerks)
7. Tiger Ranks: “Party wit Me” (Soul Jazz import)
8. Basement Jaxx: “Where’s Your Head At” (Astralwerks)
9. Full Intention featuring Shena: “I’ll Be Waiting (Gray & Pern Club Mix)” (Hed Kandi)
10. Green Velvet: “La La Land” (Relief)